Chapter 2

Olivia opened her door in a Yale sweatshirt and mismatched socks, took one look at my face, and pulled me inside without a word.

She was the only person outside my family who knew the full architecture of my life — the trust fund from my grandparents, the complicated politics of being Margaret Pierce's daughter, and the suffocating perfection of being Nathan Hale's wife. We'd been inseparable since boarding school, bound by the kind of friendship that survives distance, time, and the gravitational pull of very different lives.

"Sit," she ordered, steering me toward her worn leather couch. Her apartment was the opposite of the penthouse I shared with Nathan — small, cluttered with legal briefs and takeout containers, alive with the controlled chaos of a woman who cared more about her career as a public defender than about appearances.

She handed me a glass of water, then sat across from me, waiting.

"He's been sleeping with Elena." The words came out flat, clinical. "Since our wedding day."

Olivia's expression didn't change, but I saw her knuckles whiten around her own glass. "I'll kill him."

"There's more." I pressed my hand against my stomach. "I'm pregnant. Six weeks."

Now her expression changed. She set down her glass very carefully, as if it might explode. "Does he know?"

"No. I found out last week. I was going to tell him tonight, at the gala." A sound escaped me that might have been a laugh. "Surprise."

Olivia moved to sit beside me, wrapping her arm around my shoulders. "Okay. Okay, we're going to figure this out. First things first — do you want to go back to the penthouse tonight?"

"No." The word was immediate, visceral.

"Then you stay here. Tomorrow, we'll make a plan." She squeezed my shoulder. "Have you talked to your mother?"

My mother. Margaret Pierce, socialite, philanthropist, and the woman who had spent my entire life teaching me that a woman's greatest asset was her ability to maintain composure. She'd married my father for love and spent twenty years regretting it after he left. Then she'd married Richard Ashworth for stability and spent the next decade performing contentment so convincingly that even I sometimes believed it.

"She'll tell me to go back," I said. "She'll say every marriage has rough patches. She'll remind me about the prenup."

The prenup. I'd almost forgotten. Nathan's lawyers had presented it two weeks before the wedding — a dense, ironclad document that essentially ensured I'd walk away with nothing if the marriage ended within the first five years. I'd signed it without reading the details because I was in love and because Nathan had held my hands and said, "This is just a formality, baby. We're forever."

"The prenup has an infidelity clause," Olivia said, reading my mind. She was already in lawyer mode, her eyes sharp. "Most of them do. If we can prove he cheated—"

"Three hundred people saw his hand on my sister's thigh tonight. Half of them recorded it."

"That's a start, but we need more. Texts, emails, hotel records. Something that proves duration and pattern." She grabbed a legal pad from the coffee table. "I know I'm a public defender, not a divorce attorney, but I know people. Good people. We'll get you the best representation in the city."

I watched her write, her pen moving with the decisive strokes of someone accustomed to fighting battles. A wave of gratitude washed over me so intense it nearly broke the dam I'd built around my tears.

"Liv," I whispered. "What am I going to do?"

She looked up, her expression fierce. "You're going to survive this. And then you're going to win."

My phone — which I'd turned back on to text Olivia my arrival — lit up with a cascade of notifications. Texts from numbers I didn't recognize. Social media alerts. News notifications.

BREAKING: Hale Industries CEO Nathan Hale caught in alleged affair with wife's sister at company gala. Video goes viral.

Olivia took the phone from my trembling hands and turned it face down on the table. "Don't look at that. Not tonight."

But I'd already seen the thumbnail — a grainy phone video of me pulling off my ring, my face pale and devastated under the chandelier light. Beneath it, the comment count was already in the thousands.

"The whole world knows," I said.

"The whole world knows he's the villain," Olivia corrected firmly. "Not you. Never you."

I wanted to believe her. But as I lay awake on her couch that night, staring at the ceiling while the city hummed outside, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was only the beginning. Nathan Hale didn't lose. He didn't get humiliated. And he certainly didn't let someone walk away from him on their own terms.

My phone lit up one final time before I silenced it completely. A text from Nathan:

Come home. We need to talk about this rationally. Don't do anything stupid.

Don't do anything stupid.

I placed my hand on my stomach, feeling the warmth of my own skin, imagining the tiny cluster of cells that would become a person — my person. The first thing in my life that was entirely mine, untouched by Nathan's influence or Elena's shadow or my mother's expectations.

"I won't," I whispered to the dark. But I wasn't talking to Nathan.

I was making a promise to my child.