Divorced While Pregnant: Mr. Billionaire Thought I Cheated on Him, Now He Wants Me Back.

The pencil had gone soft in my hand, and I still hadn't gotten the drape of the skirt right. I erased the hemline for the third time and tried again. The fabric needed to look like it was moving, but at ten at night, my tired eyes and uncooperative hands weren't helping.

The doorbell rang, and I groaned out loud, dropping my pencil on the desk.

“Coming,” I called, even though there was no one there to hear me. Arden wasn't home yet. He'd texted around six to say his call with the Singapore office was running long, so I'd given up on dinner and eaten cereal at the kitchen counter instead.

I padded downstairs in my socks, half expecting the courier from the fabric house. The silk I'd ordered two weeks ago was supposed to arrive Tuesday. It was Thursday.

I opened the door and there was nothing there except a plain brown box sitting on the mat, no courier in sight, no van pulling away down the driveway. That was strange. Usually they waited for a signature.

I picked it up. It was lighter than I expected, and there was no return address or company logo, just my name and the house address printed in plain block letters.

I should have left it alone, but curiosity has always been my weakness, so I carried it into the living room, set it on the coffee table, and pulled the tape off.

Inside were photographs, a whole stack of them.

The first showed Arden getting out of a car. Nothing about that was unusual, but the woman waiting for him made my stomach drop. Celeste, his ex girlfriend.

I recognized her from the one photograph I'd seen years ago, back when Arden had mentioned her name once and never brought her up again.

I turned to the next photograph, then another. At first, I tried to find an explanation. Maybe it was a business meeting. Maybe they had run into each other over lunch. I kept looking for something that would make the pictures harmless.

By the fourth photograph, I couldn't explain it away anymore.

Arden had his hand on the small of her back as they walked into a hotel. In the next one, they were sitting across from each other at a table, their knees almost touching, with her hand resting over his.

The last few photographs were taken inside a hotel room and I turned one face down to stare at the others, my hands shaking as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

The date took me aback, three weeks ago, when Arden had told me he was in Singapore for the merger.

My eyes went back to the photographs, and that was when I noticed his watch.

The platinum one with his initials engraved inside the band. I'd spent four months of my commissions saving for it before our second anniversary. I'd wrapped it myself in blue paper because he liked blue, and when he'd opened it, he'd kissed my forehead and promised he would never take it off.

He hadn't, he had simply worn it to see someone else.

I don't know how long I sat there with the photographs spread across the coffee table. I kept waiting for my mind to find an explanation because that was what I had been doing for the past weeks. When Arden came home late, I blamed work. When he went quiet for days, I told myself he needed space.

I'd gotten so used to finding reasons for his behavior that even now, with the evidence sitting in front of me, I spent several minutes trying to find one.

I heard his car in the driveway a little after eleven. The garage door groaned open, and I listened to his footsteps come up through the mudroom. I sat there with the photographs fanned out across the coffee table and waited for him to find me.

He stopped in the doorway of the living room, tie already loosened, jacket over one arm. "You're still up."

"I was waiting for you."

My voice must have told him this wasn't a normal night, because his eyes went to the coffee table before I'd even said another word. I watched his face while he looked at the photographs. I wanted to see the confusion that would tell me this was a mistake, a setup, someone else's face superimposed onto his. I waited for literally any expression that would tell me it was all false.

What I got was indifference. His jaw tightened and his eyes moved from one photograph to the next with a kind of methodical calm that made my skin crawl, like he was reading a report rather than looking at pictures of himself.

"Arden." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "Tell me this isn't what it looks like."

He didn't answer right away. He set his jacket down over the back of the armchair like he needed the extra few seconds before he had to say anything at all.

"Arden." I stood up. "Please. Just tell me."

"You already know what it is," he said. "What else do you want me to tell you?”

My brain did a literal short circuit. I actually put a hand out to the arm of the couch to steady myself, because my legs had stopped feeling entirely reliable. “You’re not even going to try to deny it?”

"I slept with Celeste."

The way he said it made me feel hopeless. I opened my mouth to ask why, and found that the answer, no matter what it was, could never fix anything.

"Why?" I said. "Why would you do that to us? To our marriage?"

I expected him to look ashamed. I expected, at the very least, some flicker of the man who had cried at our wedding when he thought no one was looking, who had held my hand through my father's funeral without letting go once. Instead his expression hardened, when he spoke, his voice was cold and detached.

"I only continued what you started."

For a second I genuinely thought I had misheard him. "What I… what are you talking about?"

"Don't." He said it quietly, which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted it. "Don't stand there and make me spell it out."

"Spell what out? Arden, I have no idea what you're accusing me of." My voice cracked on the last word. "I have never… I have never touched another man since the day I married you, I don't understand what you think I've done."

"Stop. I'm not doing this. I'm not standing here while you lie to my face."

"I'm not lying!" The words tore out of me louder than I meant them to. "Tell me what you think I did. Tell me, and I will explain it to you, because whatever you think happened, it isn't true—"

"You know exactly what you did, Faouzia. I'm not going to let you turn yourself into the victim after everything."

"After everything?" I could hear how thin my voice had gotten, "Arden, I don't know what everything is. You have to tell me. You have to actually tell me what you think I did, because I am standing here and I have done nothing, and you are looking at me like I'm a stranger—"

"I'm done talking about this tonight." He picked his jacket back up off the armchair.

"You can't just…" I reached for his arm and he stepped back, out of my reach, and something about that small motion, the way he physically pulled away from me like I might contaminate him, made my eyes widen. I pressed a hand over my mouth and swallowed hard against the nausea climbing up my throat, and when I looked up he was already walking toward the stairs, his back to me.

"Arden." I couldn't make my voice go any louder than a whisper now. "Please don't walk away from me."

He didn't stop until I heard the bedroom door close upstairs.

I sat back down on the couch, surrounded by the photographs. For a while I just sat there in the dark, listening to the quietness, waiting to wake up from whatever this was. I went to the mantel, to the framed photograph from our wedding — Arden in his grey suit, laughing at something just out of frame, me in my mother's veil with my head tipped back against his shoulder. I picked it up and sat down on the floor with my back against the couch, holding it against my chest, and that was when the crying finally came