I almost smiled. It was such a predictable sentence.
“You missed your daughter’s birth.”
“I know.”
“You told my family I said you could leave.”
He rubbed his face. “Mel, I panicked.”
“You cheated on me while I was in labor.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
The room fell silent.
I looked at the man I had married five years earlier. The man I defended when my family mocked his income. The man I worked beside because we were “building a future.” The man who kissed another woman while I gave birth to our child.
And suddenly, I felt nothing soft for him at all.
“Was it only Rachel?” I asked.
He hesitated.
That was enough.
“Get out,” I said.
“Melanie, please—”
“Get out.”
He lowered his voice. “We can fix this.”
“No,” I said. “You can leave before security removes you.”
He looked at Lily once, then back at me, as if expecting me to break, to compromise like I always had. But labor had changed something in me. So had betrayal. So had seeing my mother beg for mercy she had never shown.
