He slumped further into the chair, defeated.
“Here’s what really gets me, Milo.”
I leaned forward, made sure he was looking at me.
“Here’s the part that I’ve been thinking about for eight days straight, that’s kept me up every single night.”
I took a breath. This was the hardest part, the part that hurt the most.
“Two weeks before you left for your business trip, I took a pregnancy test in our bathroom while you were at work.”
My voice was steady but quiet.
“It was positive. We were pregnant.”
Milo’s face went from ashen to green. His hand gripped the armrest so hard his knuckles went white.
“I was going to tell you that Friday. I had it all planned. Your favorite dinner. Sparkling cider. Maybe a little pair of baby shoes as a hint.”
I swallowed hard.
“But Thursday night, you got that emergency call about Miami. Said you had to leave the next morning. Asked for a rain check on our Friday dinner.”
“Isla,”
he whispered.
“I decided I’d wait and tell you when you got back. Make it even more special. A surprise for when you came home.”
I pulled out my phone, showed him my call log.
“But five days into your Key West vacation, I started bleeding. Heavy. Painful. Undeniable.”
His hand went to his mouth.
“I called you seventeen times that afternoon, Milo. Seventeen times. You answered twice. Both times annoyed that I was interrupting your critical meetings.”
I showed him the texts between him and Hazel from that day, the ones I’d found earlier.
“You want to know what you were doing while I was calling you? While I was bleeding and terrified and needed you?”
I read them aloud.
“Can’t believe we still have five more days here. This has been perfect.”
“That was Hazel at 11:23 a.m. You responded at 11:31. ‘I know. I never want it to end. Real life is going to suck when we get back.’”
Milo looked like he was going to be sick.
“I drove myself to the ER. Sat alone in the waiting room. Listened to a doctor I’d never met explain that I was miscarrying. Eight weeks along. Nothing they could do.”
My voice finally cracked.
“I came home to this empty apartment and grieved alone while you were getting couples massages and texting your mistress about how much you loved her.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Milo sat frozen in the chair, his face the color of chalk.
“There was a baby,”
he finally whispered.
“There was. There isn’t anymore.”
I finished my wine in one long swallow.
“And you weren’t here for any of it because you were too busy lying to my face and building a life with someone else.”
He started crying, actually crying. His shoulders shook. Tears ran down his face.
“Isla, I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry. If I’d known, if you’d told me—”
“You didn’t know because you didn’t answer your phone.”
My control finally snapped.
“You didn’t know because you were too busy betraying me to care what was happening at home.”
I stood up, grabbed the lease agreement I’d found earlier, and threw it onto the coffee table between us.
“Let’s talk about what you did know. Let’s talk about this.”
Milo looked down at the papers. His face went even paler.
“A two-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg. Lease signed by you and Hazel Pearson. Move-in date December first, three weeks from now.”
I counted off on my fingers.
“Security deposit. First and last month’s rent. Furniture already ordered. Thirty thousand dollars from our savings account. Money you told me was a short-term investment that would come back with interest.”
I spread out all the papers, the lease, the furniture receipts, the paint swatches.
“You’ve been planning this for months, Milo. Not just the affair, the exit. You were going to wait until after Christmas so you wouldn’t look like the bad guy who abandoned his wife during the holidays. Then tell me some story about how we’d grown apart, how it was mutual, how these things just happen sometimes.”
I pointed to the furniture receipts.
