Pushed Overboard Pregnant, I Crashed My Husband's Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Overboard
Wesley kisses Hallie's forehead and shoves her off the yacht while Whitney waves. A stranger pulls her out, and the Langford press release already announces a wedding.
Wesley tucked a blanket around my shoulders and kissed my forehead on the back deck of his family's yacht.
Then he put both hands on my chest and shoved me over the rail.
I was twenty weeks pregnant.
The water was so cold it knocked the air out of me before I could scream.
I came up choking, and the yacht was already pulling away.
Wesley stood at the stern with his arm around Whitney.
Whitney, my best friend since college, the maid of honor at my wedding.
She was holding his other hand, and she waved at me.
Nobody ran for a life ring.
Wesley had given the crew the weekend off, and the only people on board were the three of us.
That morning Whitney had hugged me in my kitchen and said, "Go on the cruise, Hal. Trust him. He's finally ready to sail again."
Three years ago his first wife fell off this same boat and drowned.
He had not set foot on it since.
I should have asked why today was different.
Instead I had worn my good blue dress and let him call me beautiful.
"Look at the sunset, Hal," he'd said, and kissed me, and I looked at the sunset.
Now the engines rose to a roar, and the stern light of the Marguerite shrank to a point.
His first wife, Tilda, had been in this same water, and I had cried at her portrait on our mantel.
I had grabbed at the rail on my way over, and my hand had torn a ring buoy off its hook.
It was floating next to my face.
I got an arm through it and held on.
My wet dress dragged at my legs.
I kicked off one shoe, then the other.
Under my ribs, the baby kicked back.
It was the hardest she had ever moved.
"I've got you," I told her.
Then I said it again, louder, because my teeth were chattering too hard for the first one to count.
I swam on my college team for four years, and I knew what cold water does.
You have maybe an hour before your arms stop listening.
I could not see land, only a smear of lights far off to the west.
Wesley knew I could swim.
He had made sure the lights were that far away.
I rolled onto my back with the ring under my arms and started kicking toward them.
I will not cry until I'm out, I told myself.
The sky went from orange to gray.
My hands stopped feeling like hands.
Somewhere in the dark ahead, an engine was running low.
It was not the Marguerite.
This one was quieter, and it had no lights at all.
"Over here!" I screamed. "Please!"
A shape slid out of the dark, a small fishing boat with a man at the wheel.
He cut the engine and threw me a line before I even finished the word.
"Grab it," he said. "Don't talk. Just grab it."
I got both hands around the rope.
He hauled me in fast and lifted me over the side with one arm under my knees.
He was tall and dark-haired, in a gray work jacket, with a face that gave me nothing.
I landed on the bench shaking so hard I bit my tongue.
Folded towels were already stacked beside me.
A thick heated blanket was plugged into the console.
He wrapped it around me and pulled the towels over my hair.
"Lucky," I said through my teeth. "You had all this ready."
"I fish at night," he said.
His hand dropped to my belly for half a second and came away.
"How far along?"
"Twenty weeks."
He nodded and said nothing else.
Under a tarp near the stern, a tripod was strapped down beside a bucket.
I looked away from it.
I did not care what a fisherman kept on his boat.
"I'm Mason," he said. "What's your name?"
"Hallie."
"I saw you go over, Hallie."
I stared at the black water where the yacht's lights had been.
"My husband pushed me."
I said it plainly, because anything else would have been a lie.
"I believe you," Mason said.
"Give me your phone. I'll call the police."
He did not move.
"That's Langford's yacht," he said. "His father sits on the harbor board, and the sheriff eats at his table."
I knew that.
Everyone in Harbor Point knew that.
"The Coast Guard will search until dark tomorrow and call it a drowning by noon," Mason said. "Your friend on that deck will cry on camera and say you slipped."
My friend would say exactly that.
I knew it.
I put my hand on my stomach and felt the baby turn.
If I called, Wesley's family would hear within the hour.
If I walked into a police station dripping and pregnant, it would be my word against four people who owned the harbor.
If I stayed dead, they would stop looking.
So I made my decision, and it was one plain sentence.
"I'm not calling anyone. Let them think I drowned."
Mason turned the wheel without a word.
An hour later we tied up at a boathouse on the north shore, and he walked me inside with the blanket around my shoulders.
He put a mug of tea in my hands and a dry sweatshirt on the chair.
Then he held out his phone.
"Read it," he said.
It was a press release, posted on the Langford Marine page.
*In grief and in joy, Wesley Langford and Whitney Delamotte will marry this Saturday on the family lawn.*
The time stamp said it had gone up before the Coast Guard finished its first search.
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