The morning sickness was too much for me.
I’d told my manager I’d be working from home the moment I woke up. For the first time in the last week since I’d found out, I was actually relieved that Damien hadn’t been in bed beside me this morning. He didn’t notice how quickly I’d run to the bathroom, didn’t notice the retching sounds as I spilled stomach acid into the toilet, didn’t notice how pale my face had gone. I wasn’t even sure if he’d made it to the bedroom at all last night.
I’d sent him a text letting him know, too, that I wouldn’t be in the office today. I’d offered to get Noah after school instead of having Caroline take him for the afternoon, but Lucas and him had already made plans to finish their video game, so I let that go.
I could handle a day on my own, lost in my own head. I’d been in my head for days with Damien being so busy, anyway.
It had taken me a week to come to terms with the pregnancy and telling Damien. Sophie was right — it wasn’t okay for me to keep it from him like Marissa did. I’d decided I’d tell him once things settled, maybe even after the custody hearing, when another stressor on his plate wouldn’t make him explode. I’d deal with the consequences then.
The whirr of the printer on the other side of my home office brought me back into my body and away from my mind. Page after page of environmental reports printed, and once I realized just how many pages it was, I searched for my stapler.
Odd. It should be right…there.
Where the fuck was my stapler?
I pushed my rolling chair back and popped my earbuds out. The silence of Damien’s too-large house was shockingly unsettling — I was so used to having at least the steady hum of children’s cartoons in the background while I worked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d stayed home without Noah around, and the more that I considered it, it might have actually been the first time.
I slipped from my chair and looked through my filing cabinet, checked my drawers, checked each shelf of the bookshelves Damien had recently installed. I couldn’t remember ever opening the closet in here, but I also had pregnancy brain and wouldn’t have put it past myself to forget that, so I checked there, too.
Coming up thoroughly empty-handed, I almost gave up. I could have just held the stacks together with smaller sized binder clips, but the temptation to abandon my work for a couple of minutes to get to the bottom of my mini-mystery was too tempting. I could use a break and maybe a snack, if my stomach would allow for it.
Rounding the open office door on the top floor, I made my way past useless rooms that sat unfurnished and forgotten, save for Damien’s home gym. For a moment, just a fleeting, passing second, I let myself envision what I’d do with them if I lived here more than I already did. If the planets aligned and Damien wanted me and the clump of cells growing inside of me, and wanted me to stay…
I’d start by turning what was considered “my” room on the second floor into a nursery.
I’d move my things into Damien’s room, and Noah could sleep next door to his little brother or sister, close enough that I wouldn’t need to worry too much and far enough that we would still have our privacy.
As I took the stairs down to the second floor, my footsteps echoing in the eerie quiet, I considered turning one of the third floor rooms into a playroom for Noah and the baby. But the thought of us being downstairs and them being so far away seemed daunting, so my mind shifted, turning, tearing down the wall that divided the two unused rooms and redecorating it entirely. Damien’s home office could move up there instead of being on the ground floor, and we could turn his office into a playroom instead. No stairs needed.
His office.
Shit, that had to be where my stapler was.
He’d been working from home in the evenings and late into the night. He must have needed my stapler and gone searching for mine, the thought not even crossing his mind to tell me or put it back.
Padding down the last set of stairs into the open living room on the ground floor, I rounded the corner, stepping into the hallway that ran opposite to the kitchen. There was only one door along it, which I’d always considered kind of odd every time I came back here — one that led directly into his office.
The scent of oak invaded my nostrils. Everything in here was polished wood, dark paint, and matched the shadowy design of his kitchen and living room. But then the hint of lingering almonds, rum, and vanilla came swiftly after as I made my way to his desk. A last little reminder that he’d spent all night in here.
I sunk down into his office chair, doing a quick scan of the top of his desk and coming up short. He’d bought the exact same chair for my space upstairs, and although his was slightly more plush from less use overall, it was just as comfortable. His home laptop sat on his desk undisturbed and closed, and although the temptation was there, I didn’t open it.
But I needed my damn stapler.
One long drawer ran along the top of the footwell, and I checked there first, but found nothing except a couple of stacks of unused post-it notes and a handful of slightly bent paperclips.
The upper drawer to my left held two stacks of paper, both some kind of legal paperwork that I didn’t fully understand, but I could at least gather that they were to do with the lawsuits from Blackwood’s against the four companies he’d acquired.
In the lower drawer to the left, I found nothing but a faint sheen of dust on the bottom of it and a single discarded paperclip half-lodged in the wood at the very back.
I turned to my right, hooking my finger on the handle of the upper drawer, and tugged. My breath caught.
There, on top of a stack of papers, sat my stapler. Finally.
I wrapped my digits around it and lifted the heavy duty stapler up onto the desk, but the moment I went to close the drawer, my vision snagged on my own name. Damien Blackwood and Olivia Martin.
I looked a little closer, pulling the drawer further out so I could see the entire top sheet of paper. Application For Annulment: Notice of Acceptance was written across the top in big bold lettering, and my fucking heart stopped beating.
What… the hell?
With shaking hands, I lifted the papers out of the drawer. The date on the top right corner was nearly two weeks ago. I scanned the page, hoping that maybe it was just a standard bit of mail to inform the two applicants that their paperwork had been accepted by the office but was still pending approval. But the more I read, the more my stomach churned, and the more angry I became.
It wasn’t pending approval.
They were waiting for a court date to be set.
————
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I heard the front door alarm chime.
I hadn’t even moved from his office. I must have spent hours upon hours staring at those papers, reading every line, memorizing them. I vaguely remember calling the courthouse to ask whether a date had been set in the hopes that maybe he’d just recently scheduled it and hadn’t had the chance to tell me, but the woman on the phone informed me that both parties need to agree to the date before it was finalized.
I’d almost thrown up on his desk after that.
Steps padded through the living room, and even in my haze of shock and anger, even with my inability to move, I could feel myself vibrating, could feel my heart pounding against my ribcage. Part of me hoped it was Caroline, but I knew deep down in my gut that it wasn’t.
The footsteps grew closer, closer, closer.
And stopped.
“Liv?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tear my gaze from the papers in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to move from his chair, my knees tucked up against my chest, my toes dangling off the edge, my arms around my shins. I didn’t care that I was still in what I considered pajamas when Noah wasn’t around — a far too large shirt of Damien’s and nothing else.
“Fuck,” Damien sighed, and something leather and metal hit the ground. Had to be his briefcase.
The backs of my eyes burned, but I hadn’t drank any water since I’d come downstairs and I’d cried out far too many tears. They wouldn’t form — only threatened to.
“Liv—”
“Don’t.” My throat ached around the word. It felt raw, sounded raw, and I almost wished I’d had the forethought to pack my things and leave before he came home. But I couldn’t do that to Noah.
“Can I explain?” he asked, a thump from his step as his legs slowly entered my field of vision.
I sniffled and wiped at my dry eyes out of instinct. “I don’t want your excuses,” I choked. “How long have you had them?”
He took a deep, noisy breath in before he spoke again. “A week and a half.”
“You’ve been lying to me for a week and a—”
“No,” he interjected, slowly lowering himself into the leather chair that sat opposite his desk. His suit jacket, his button-up, his tie — I could see it all except his face. I didn’t want to see that, though, didn’t want to see whatever anguished expression he was pulling as if I was the one hurting him. “I’ve been lying to you for two days. I was avoiding the question before that.”
“That doesn’t make it better,” I scoffed.
“I know that,” he said, his tone far too gentle, too soft. “I do.”
A heavy, charged silence fell over us. I gripped onto myself, digging my nails into my exposed skin, wishing, wanting to have never agreed to any of this. For a shattering second, I didn’t care that it would mean I wouldn’t have what was growing inside of me, and the shocking wave of guilt from that thought only drove my emotions to a peak.
For the first time in what felt like hours, I moved, but only enough to drop my forehead to my knees. I needed to breathe, needed to get a handle on myself, but I wasn’t sure if I could. How much better was I when I was keeping something from him, too?
No. They aren’t the same. I was keeping my secret to guard him from another overbearing stress when he had so many already.
He was keeping this from me to ensure I stayed put.
“Liv,” he swallowed, the chair creaking beneath him. When he spoke again, his voice came from above, as if he’d stood up again and was leaning across his desk. “I’m so sorry. I made a horrible choice but I need you to understand that I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it—”
“I know why you did it,” I sobbed. The lack of tears felt so wrong when my body was doing everything else that came with crying — the stuffy nose, the shaking breaths, the urge to crawl into myself and never come out. “That’s the hardest fucking part.”
For the first time since he’d started speaking, I could hear the pain in his voice. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he croaked. “Ethan said this was the only thing that would work. And you’d already made it incredibly clear that staying married to me was the last thing you wanted. But I—I couldn’t risk losing him. I’m sorry, Liv. I’m so… fuck, I’m so sorry.”
His heavy breathing, his steps back, forced me to lift my head, to look at him.
There, across the desk from me and a few paces away, he stared at me. The same blue eyes that I saw in his son were fixed on me, reflecting the soft golden rays of sunlight that poured in from behind me, far too glossy and damp. The fine lines across his forehead had deepened, and one hand pushed back the once-styled mess of black and gray hair atop his head. He looked genuinely frightened, and I knew exactly why I’d avoided this, why I’d kept myself from looking at him.
Seeing him like that only made me want to fix it. But I was the one who was broken here.
Still, I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t hold myself back from slipping into those people pleasing tendencies that I needed to reign in desperately. “You could have asked me, Damien. You could have told me that was what you needed. But you lied.”
“You would have said no and I would have been fucking screwed,” he shot back, a mixture of anger and anguish in his tone. I rocked back from the blow. “Shit, Liv, I’m sorry—”
“Fuck you.” His insinuation that I wouldn’t have bent over backward for him was a low enough blow that it snapped me out of it. I moved again, finally regaining some kind of composure over myself, and forced my body up and out of the chair. “If you think for one second that I wouldn’t have put my needs aside to ensure that Noah ended up with you, then you are out of your Goddamn mind.”
“You said—”
“You think I give a fuck what I said?” I snapped, wiping the snot from my nostrils with the back of my hand. God, my throat felt raw. “Do you understand how much I have given to you? Do you understand the lengths I have gone to, for you? I watched your son. I moved into your home.”
“Liv, please—”
“I practically gave up my personal life, my time at the office, my reputation at the office, for you. I assumed the role of a fucking parent, for you. I gave you a part of myself that I vowed I wouldn’t give to anyone but the person I’d spend the rest of my Goddamn life with. I have kept everything bottled inside of myself, every feeling I have for you, so that you wouldn’t have another stressor on your plate. And you’re going to sit there and tell me that I wouldn’t have given a shit if you needed me to stay married to you for Noah’s sake? No. Absolutely not. If it came down to my personal comfort versus Noah having a stable, loving home, I would have picked the latter. And you should have known that, but you couldn’t even bring yourself to ask me.”
Wide blue eyes stared so intensely into mine that I thought, for a moment, that I might have broken him. Breaths came and went with at least a couple hundred heartbeats, and all I could do was stare right back.
Why the fuck didn’t I leave?
“Then I’m asking you now,” he rasped, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he forced himself to swallow. “Stay married to me, for Noah. We can schedule the court date right after the custody hearing.”
I clenched my teeth to keep my jaw from wobbling. Every part of my body screamed to run, but my head and my heart were two blaring exceptions — they still wanted to please him. And they had the most sway. “Fine,” I breathed. “But you don’t fucking deserve it.”
