Chapter 4

The next month was a kind of war. Not the kind with guns and bombs, but the kind fought in broad daylight, in quiet conversations and careful smiles, in the spaces between words where the real messages live.

I didn't tell Jonah about Selene. Not yet. I came home from the hospital that morning to find him in the kitchen, still in his tuxedo from the gala, hunched over a cup of coffee with his tie loosened. He looked tired, but he looked up when I walked in, and a smile crossed his face.

"Hey, you're back." He stood, crossing to kiss my forehead. "I was worried when you didn't come home last night. How's the baby?"

"Fine. She's fine." I forced a smile, letting him pull me into a hug. I could smell the gala on him, the expensive wine and the expensive perfume of a hundred people who'd spent the night pretending to like each other. I didn't see Selene's scent among them. "Just a precaution. They wanted to monitor her overnight."

"You should have called. I would have come." He pulled back, studying my face. "Are you sure you're okay? Your forehead—"

"Bumped it against the IV pole." I touched the thin scab, already fading. "Clumsy me."

He didn't push further. That was the thing about Jonah—he never pushed. He accepted the version of reality I handed him, trusting that I'd tell him if something was truly wrong. It was a privilege I'd never taken for granted.

Until now.

For the next few weeks, I played the role of the devoted wife. I went to dinner with Jonah's partners, smiled at their jokes, listened to their stories about golf and stocks and the deals that made the world go around. I let him touch my belly, feeling the baby kick, and I watched his face light up with a joy that made my heart ache.

And I waited.

I watched Selene from a distance, tracking her movements through the social channels I'd learned to navigate since marrying Jonah. She'd canceled her appearance at a charity luncheon, I noticed. She'd skipped the opening of a gallery she usually attended. She was pulling back, retrenching, trying to figure out what to do about the bomb I'd dropped on her.

Good. Let her squirm.

I spent my days gathering more ammunition. I made a few discreet calls, called in a few favors. A former colleague from the gallery had a cousin who worked at Manhattan Fertility Associates. A former classmate from Columbia was now a junior associate at a law firm that specialized in family law. Neither asked too many questions, and both were happy to trade information for a promise of future consideration.

And I built a file. A growing collection of evidence—printouts, screenshots, notes on conversations that would be hard to prove but impossible to deny. I kept it in a hidden folder on my laptop, password-protected, backed up to a cloud drive that even Jonah didn't know about.

The date of the dinner was approaching. I could feel it coming toward me, a freight train of reckoning.