On Our Fourth Anniversary, My Husband Posed for Maternity Photos with Another Woman novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Anniversary Photos
Leah's phone fills with photos of her husband kissing his coworker's baby bump during their anniversary dinner, and she takes off her ring in front of his mother.
The photos arrived while the waiter was pouring Rupert's wine into his empty glass.
I was alone at table twelve of the restaurant where Rupert and I had eaten dinner the night we got married.
It was our fourth anniversary, and I was nine weeks pregnant.
The ultrasound printout was folded in my purse, under my lipstick, and I had practiced my sentence all the way across town.
Rupert was forty minutes late.
His mother had texted at ten to seven.
"He's stuck on a call, sweetheart. Order the wine. He loves that you plan things."
I had ordered the wine.
At ten past seven my phone buzzed with a number I didn't know.
There was no message, only seven photos, one after another, each one a small buzz against the tablecloth.
The first showed a white studio with a stool and a long cream gown stretched over a round belly.
Brooke Dunleavy stood in the gown with both hands under the bump.
Brooke ran operations at Kessling Flooring, where Rupert was a sales director.
She had driven me to the clinic after my third failed round and handed me ginger candies in the parking lot.
She had worked from home since August because of her blood pressure, so I hadn't seen her in person for months.
In the second photo Rupert knelt in front of her in his gray suit.
I knew that suit, because I had picked it up from the cleaners on Friday.
In the third he had his mouth against the bump and his eyes shut.
In the seventh his left hand lay on her hip, and the ring I had put on him caught the studio light.
I sat there until the waiter came back and asked if I wanted to wait for my husband.
"Bring the bread," I said.
When he left, I sent all seven photos to my private email, the one Rupert didn't have the password for.
Then I opened them again, one at a time, and looked at his face.
He looked happy.
For three years Rupert had given me an injection every night, and he had never let me touch the vials.
He said watching me stab myself made him sick.
When I told him in August that I was done, he asked me three times to try one more round.
Marianne walked in at twenty-five past seven.
She wore her camel coat and carried a small gift bag, and she smelled of gardenias.
"Happy anniversary, darling," she said, and kissed my cheek. "I couldn't wait until Sunday."
She set the bag on the table. Inside were two crystal champagne flutes wrapped in tissue.
"Rupert's running late, I told you. You know how the company is."
I turned my phone around and slid it across the cloth.
Marianne looked at the screen.
She looked at it for a long time, and she didn't ask who the woman was.
She didn't ask what I was showing her.
"Leah," she said, "let's not do this here."
I hadn't raised my voice, but a couple at the next table turned around anyway.
"How long have you known she was pregnant?" I said.
Marianne picked up her water glass and drank half of it.
That was my answer.
My phone lit up with Rupert's name and a photo of us on a dock last summer.
I turned it face down.
I looked at my left hand, at the thin gold band I had never taken off in four years, not even to wash dishes.
So I took off my ring.
I set it on the tissue paper between the two crystal flutes.
"Tell him it's an anniversary present," I said.
I zipped the ultrasound printout into the inside pocket of my purse, where Rupert would never find it.
I paid for the wine with my own card, and the waiter kindly didn't ask about dessert.
Marianne caught up with me on the sidewalk.
She took my arm, gently, and kept her voice low and warm.
"Brooke is due on the sixth of January," she said. "A divorce takes months, Leah. You have time to be sensible about this."
"You knew," I said.
"I know everything that happens in my family."
I put my hand flat against my stomach under my coat before I realized I had done it.
Nobody in the Kessling family knew what was in there.
Mine was due in May, and I walked to my car without saying so.
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