My Husband Buried Me for His Mistress

I woke up reaching for him. My hand found cold sheets.

I found my robe and went downstairs, bare feet slapping marble that still smelled like fresh paint. The Foster penthouse. My new home. Nathanael's home, really. I hadn't lived in it long enough to call it mine.

He was already at the breakfast table. Coffee, orange juice, a folded copy of the Times he wasn't reading. And across from him sat a woman I only half-recognized from the wedding — dark hair pulled back tight, a tablet in her hand, a blazer that looked pressed even at eight in the morning.

"Nathanael," I said, and reached for his hand on the table.

He pulled it back before I touched it. Just moved it to his lap, smooth as anything, like he'd rehearsed it in the mirror.

The woman looked up and smiled. It was a nice smile. Too nice. "Coffee, Mrs. Foster?" she asked. "I'm Armani. Armani Mendoza. I handle Nathanael's schedule."

"Thank you," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. I sat down. Nobody explained why his assistant was at our breakfast table the morning after our wedding. Nobody explained why my husband wouldn't look at me.

I told myself it was nothing. A meeting that ran long. A habit from before me.

I was wrong about a lot of things that year.

It started small. My card stopped working at the pharmacy — insufficient funds, the girl at the register said, and I stood there red-faced with a bag of prenatal vitamins I hadn't told anyone about yet. My driver, Miguel, who used to bring me coffee in the mornings, was reassigned. A new man drove me instead, silent, never looking in the mirror.

Then the photos started. Nathanael at a gala with some model, her hand on his arm. Nathanael at a restaurant with an influencer I didn't recognize, laughing at something she said. Every single one landed in my phone within the hour, some helpful stranger tagging me, asking if I'd seen.

I went to his study one night. He was bent over one of his little architectural models, adjusting a piece of balsa wood with tweezers like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

"What did I do?" I asked. My voice cracked on the last word. "Please, just tell me what I did."

He didn't look up. "You know exactly what you did."

That was it. That was the whole sentence. He went back to his model, and I stood there in the doorway until my legs remembered how to move.

I started seeing a psychiatrist that month. Dr. Lennon Bishop, an office in Midtown with a view of nothing special. She had steady hands and a way of watching me that made me feel like a specimen under glass — not unkind, just thorough.

"Tell me about the wedding," she said, in that first session.

I told her the party, the flowers, the vows. Halfway through, my thumbnail found my palm and pressed in hard. She noticed. Of course she noticed. She didn't say anything. She just wrote something down and asked me another question.

Then I found out I was pregnant.

I sat on the bathroom floor with the test in my hand for a long time. I did the math in my head, and the math brought me to a night I remembered and Nathanael didn't — a night he came home from Armani's rehearsal-dinner send-off drunk out of his mind, a night I told him no and he didn't hear me, a night he never mentioned again because, I would learn much later, he'd made sure he never would.

I decided to tell him anyway. I don't know what I thought would happen. Maybe some small, stupid part of me thought a baby could fix what the wedding night had broken.

He was at his desk. I said the words. His face went still — not surprised-still, but a stillness I'd never seen on him before, the kind that made the air in the room feel thinner.

"Whose is it?" he asked. Quiet. Almost gentle. That was the worst part.

Then he turned back to his desk, and that was the end of the conversation.

Two weeks later he handed my care over to a Dr. Marcus Hale, a Foster family physician with a soft handshake and eyes that never quite met mine. "Just routine," he said, the day he checked me into the private wing.

I woke up in a room with no windows I could open and no one in the chair beside my bed. No one at all.

I understood before anyone told me. I pressed my thumbnail into my palm until the skin split, a thin red line, and I stared at the ceiling tile until the pattern stopped meaning anything.

I didn't cry. I had already learned that crying didn't get me anything in this house.