She Took My Husband on My Wedding Night, I Didn't Find Out Until We Gave Birth Together novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Other Bed
The morning after Clem and her best friend give birth side by side, her husband tells her how both babies were made, and Clem throws him out of the room, only for a cold voice to tell her the house will burn on her daughter's first birthday.
My best friend and I had our babies seven minutes apart, in two beds four feet from each other.
By breakfast I was giddy on no sleep and hospital pudding.
"We should arrange a marriage," I said. "Your boy, my girl. We'd be in-laws. Think of the holidays."
Valerie laughed from her bed with her eyes shut.
My husband didn't.
Bradford stood at the window in yesterday's suit, thumbing his phone.
He turned around slowly.
"They're siblings," he said. "They can't get married."
I laughed, because it had to be a joke.
Bradford never made jokes. I'd spent six years teaching him how, and he still told them.
Then he smiled, easy.
"Our wedding night," he said. "After we went to bed, I put sleeping pills in your water glass."
He slid the phone into his pocket.
"Valerie laid her slip over your face so the lamp wouldn't wake you. Then she got into bed with me. On my side. Right next to you. We didn't stop until the sun came up."
He said it like he was reading me a menu.
"That's the night you both got pregnant."
The room went very quiet.
Margo made a small wet sound in the bassinet by my bed.
I turned my head toward the other bed.
Valerie had stopped laughing. Her eyes were still closed. Her lashes were shaking.
At twenty I took fifteen knife wounds in the alley behind the bar where we both waited tables.
The man had come for her. I got between them.
She sat by my bed in the ICU for nine days and said she owed me her whole life.
Bradford stepped sideways into my line of sight, so all I could see was his tie.
"Don't look at her like that," he said. "She isn't taking your place."
"What is she taking?"
"Nothing. We'll all live at the house. The babies grow up together. Legally you're still my wife."
"Legally."
"Same room. Same allowance. Gran never has to know a thing."
Something cold slid in behind my eyes.
It had been two years since I'd heard it.
[Contractor. The villain redemption has failed.]
My hands went flat on the blanket.
[Would the Contractor like to abandon the mission and leave this realm now? Your original life will be restored.]
My original life.
A dorm room in Columbus. Morning shifts at the campus coffee bar. A phone with a cracked screen, open to a romance novel called The Kingsford Heir's Obsession.
I fell asleep reading chapter one hundred and fifty.
I woke up on a bench in South Station, nineteen years old, with no ID and a voice in my head.
Redeem the villain. Then go home.
So I did the job.
I made Bradford Kingsford laugh. I made him call his grandmother on Sundays. I married him.
And he put the book's heroine in my wedding bed while I slept.
"Clementine," Bradford said. "Are you listening to me?"
[The child is of this realm,] the voice said. [The child remains.]
I looked at Margo.
Six pounds, eleven ounces. A furious red face. A full head of dark hair.
Born at 4:12 this morning while I squeezed Valerie's hand across the gap between our beds.
"No," I said out loud.
Bradford frowned. "No what?"
"I'm not leaving her."
"Nobody asked you to leave. That's my whole point."
I swung my legs off the bed.
Everything below my waist told me not to.
I stood anyway, one hand on the rail, and lifted Margo out of the bassinet.
The door opened.
A nurse came in with a tray of paper cups. Behind her came Winifred Kingsford with her white cane and a paper bag of mint chocolates, just like she'd promised.
"Where's my great-granddaughter?" Winifred said.
"Right here," I said. "And her father just told me he drugged me on my wedding night so he could sleep with my best friend beside me."
The nurse stopped dead.
Winifred's cane stopped tapping.
Bradford laughed, low and warm.
It was the laugh I'd taught him.
"She's been up for thirty hours, Gran. The doctor said she might get confused."
"I'm not confused." I looked at the nurse. "I want him out of this room. I want him off my daughter's visitor list. And I want a different room, because the woman in that bed helped him."
Valerie opened her eyes at last.
"Clem," she whispered. "Please. Not in front of everyone."
"You didn't mind an audience in July."
The nurse set her tray down.
She walked to the panel by the door and pressed the button. "Security to four-eighteen, please."
Bradford's smile finally cracked.
He leaned in close, so only I could hear.
"You have no money that isn't mine. No family. No past anyone can find. You were nobody when I met you."
I shifted Margo to my left arm.
I pulled my wedding ring off with my right hand. It stuck at the knuckle, because everything on me was still swollen.
I twisted until it came free and dropped it into his breast pocket.
"Then I'll be nobody somewhere else."
Winifred looked from him to me for a long moment.
She didn't say a word.
Two guards came in. Bradford raised both hands and walked out ahead of them.
Valerie turned her face to the wall.
[Refusal recorded,] the voice said. [Contractor protection is withdrawn. The original ending is restored.]
I held Margo tighter.
I never read the ending. I fell asleep before I got there.
[On the night of Margo Kingsford's first birthday,] the voice said, [the Kingsford house burns. No one inside survives.]
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