Chapter 1

"Best decision I ever made — leaving you."

The words bounced off the pale green walls of the maternity wing like a rubber ball, and Mara Ellison felt them hit her chest a half-second before she let them fall to the polished tile floor at her feet. She stood ten feet away from Derek Calloway, her ex-husband, who was leaning against the hallway wall with his arms crossed and his chin tipped up at exactly the angle she remembered from a thousand arguments in their old kitchen. His sandy blond hair was shorter now, cut clean at the sides. His navy suit jacket strained slightly at the shoulders, the way it always had when he'd been lifting weights at the gym three times a week and telling everyone who asked that he was doing it for his health. He looked like a man who had won, and he was making sure every stranger in earshot knew it.

Two nurses at the station down the corridor turned their heads. A man in a grey hoodie sitting on the waiting-area bench lowered his phone. A young couple near the elevator, the woman holding a balloon bouquet that said IT'S A GIRL, stopped mid-laugh and looked at Mara with the particular wariness people reserve for someone being publicly undone.

Derek didn't lower his voice. If anything, he raised it.

"She gave me a son," he said, gesturing toward Priya Raval, who stood beside him with a one-year-old boy pressed against her shoulder. The child was dressed in a pale blue onesie with tiny sailboats printed across the chest. He had Derek's sandy hair and Priya's dark eyes, and he was chewing on the edge of a green blanket with the calm focus of a baby who had no idea he was being used as a weapon. "You never could."

Priya kept her eyes on the blanket. She was wearing an emerald green blouse and small gold hoop earrings, the same earrings she'd worn to Mara's wedding eight years ago, and she was rocking the baby in a slow, rhythmic motion that looked practiced from months of doing it. The smile on her face was small and polite, a mask Mara had watched her put on and take off for more than a decade. It didn't reach her eyes. It never did, when the camera wasn't on.

Mara smoothed the sleeve of her cream cashmere cardigan and straightened her back. Her slate grey dress fell just below her knees. Her thin silver bracelet caught the fluorescent light for a moment as she folded her hands in front of her. She'd bought this cardigan six months ago at a shop above the bakery where she rented her apartment, and she still remembered the way the shop owner had looked at her when she handed over the cash, like she was someone worth helping. It had cost more than she should have spent. She'd worn it anyway, because Derek had always called cream "her color," and she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her dressed like someone who'd given up.