“Mitchell,” my voice came out as a wet, broken whisper. “What are you…?”
“Don’t.” He held up his free hand without even looking at me. “Just don’t, Emma. We both know this has been coming.”
Natalie—beautiful, childless, twenty-five-year-old Natalie—squeezed his hand. She cast a look in my direction that wasn’t quite pity and wasn’t quite triumph. It was worse. It was relief.
“I’m sorry, Em,” she said. And the nickname she’d called me since we were kids playing in the mud felt like acid poured into my ears. “But we’re in love. We have been for months.”
The room was so quiet I could hear the antique grandfather clock ticking in the corner. Tick. Tock. Counting down the seconds of my humiliation. Thirty women who had come to celebrate the impending arrival of my first child now sat frozen, teacups halfway to their mouths, watching my husband walk out on me at my own baby shower.
But it was my mother-in-law, Catherine, who finally broke the silence.
“Well,” she said, setting down her porcelain teacup with a sharp, deliberate clink. She smoothed the fabric of her skirt, not looking at her son, but at me. “I suppose this finally explains why the baby doesn’t look like our family in the ultrasound photos.”
The cruelty in her voice hit me like a physical slap. This woman who had pretended to love me for three years, who had helped me pick out ‘Buttercup Yellow’ paint for the nursery just last week, was now sitting there with satisfaction written in the lines around her mouth.w
