Silence stretched for a few seconds inside the room.
I stood at the door, fingers white-knuckled around my purse strap.
"Piers, if you two don't get divorced, and she refuses to accept the baby I'm carrying, then what? I'm serious. I want to keep this child."
Piers's voice was heavy with exhaustion. "Christina, stop this."
"I'm not doing anything."
She sounded wounded, aggrieved. "I just don't understand. What is it about her you can't let go of? Didn't you tell me she'd been with someone else back then? If she disgusts you that much, why won't you just divorce her?"
Every muscle in my body locked.
"When you're lying next to her, doesn't it eat at you?"
"Christina."
"Fine, fine, I'll drop it. But are you going to divorce her or not?"
"Not right now."
"Then when?"
Another stretch of silence.
I stood at the door, cold seeping through every inch of me.
I still remembered that night. Piers had called to say he'd been in a car accident and told me to hurry over. I ended up cornered in an alley for nearly an hour. My clothes were torn, but nothing worse happened. In the end, Piers was the one who called the police and got me out. He'd held me and told me it wasn't my fault, that it was okay.
I thought he truly didn't care.
But all along, it had been a thorn buried in his heart.
When no clear answer came, Christina stormed out, her heels hammering the floor like gunshots.
I pushed the door open and walked straight in.
Piers looked up. A flicker of shock crossed his face.
My palm connected with his cheek before the placating hand he'd raised could reach me.
"What you just said. Did you mean it?"
He blinked, and his expression shifted in an instant. "Kate, you're misunderstanding. She and I aren't like that."
"I saw everything, Piers. Are you really going to lie to my face right now?"
The certainty in my eyes drained the fight out of him. His shoulders sagged.
"I... those weren't my real feelings. I was just trying to calm her down. Let me explain. She's pregnant and emotionally unstable. I was afraid she'd make a scene. It was nothing. I didn't mean a word of it."
"Kate, don't you know how I've treated you all these years? That incident was so long ago. When have I ever held it against you?"
"Sweetheart..."
His voice cracked. He reached for me.
"I just wanted a child. She doesn't mean anything to me."
I stepped back.
"Two choices."
I looked him dead in the eye, detached, like a stranger watching from the outside. "Come home with me right now. Call Christina in front of me and end it. Completely."
"Or we meet at City Hall."
The words landed, and panic flooded his face. "Sweetheart! Listen to me. Christina's emotions are all over the place right now. She's carrying a child!"
"You know how badly I've wanted a baby all these years."
"Please. Just give me some time. I'll end things with her, I swear..."
I drew a long breath. "How long?"
"How much time do you need?"
"A month? Two months? Or are you going to wait until she delivers?"
I watched his gaze dart away from mine, and suddenly I didn't want to ask anything else.
I turned around and pushed the door open.
An hour later, I was sitting on a hospital bed in the OB-GYN ward.
By the time I walked out, the sky had gone completely dark.
Josie was waiting at the entrance, a document folder in her hand.
"Kate, these are the Harding Group's financial records from the past three years. Several transfers don't add up. I had someone dig into them. The amounts aren't small."
The day I mailed the divorce papers, Piers came home that very night. He'd been unreachable for seven days, but the moment those papers hit, he appeared.
He saw me packing a suitcase in the bedroom and snatched it out of my hands.
"What do you think you're doing? Where are you going?"
