“Sign them!” my husband sneered, one arm wrapped around my sister’s waist as she rubbed her stomach and smiled at me like she’d already won.

“Sign them!” my husband sneered, one arm around my sister’s waist as she rubbed her stomach and smiled like she’d already won. I swallowed the humi:liation, picked up the pen, and signed every page without a tear. “That’s more like it,” he laughed. But when his mother opened the final folder, the color vanished from her face. She looked at me, trembling—and finally understood what I had actually signed.

“Sign them!” my husband sneered, one arm locked around my sister’s waist while her hand rested possessively over the small curve of her stomach. I picked up the pen, signed every page without shedding a tear, and watched them mistake my silence for surrender.

Three months earlier, I had still believed Daniel Mercer was my husband.

Now he stood across the dining table in the mansion my grandfather had left me, looking at me like an employee he had finally decided to fire.

Beside him, my younger sister Vanessa smiled.

Pregnant.

By my husband.

“You’re taking this surprisingly well,” she said.

Daniel laughed. “Claire knows when she’s lost.”

His mother, Margaret, sat at the head of the table, diamonds flashing at her throat. She had disliked me since the wedding, mostly because my money had never become hers.

The papers sat stacked before me.

Divorce settlement.

Property transfers.

Corporate resignations.

Waivers.

Daniel tapped the pages. “You sign, you keep the apartment downtown and two hundred thousand dollars. You fight me, you get nothing.”

I looked at Vanessa.

“When?”

She tilted her head. “Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Eight months.”

Eight months.

Vanessa was four months pregnant.

The affair had begun while I was undergoing fertility treatments.

Something cold settled inside me.

Margaret leaned forward. “Stop embarrassing yourself, Claire. Vanessa can give Daniel what you couldn’t.”