Arden’s POV
I gave her two days on purpose. Two days to sit somewhere and think about what she'd done, calm down, come back with an apology I had already decided I wasn't going to accept easily, because she wasn’t allowed to sleep with my own brother and walk away from that with nothing more than a folder of divorce papers and a dramatic exit.
I was still telling myself that when I pulled into the driveway, rehearsing the conversation I expected to have, the one where she tried to explain herself and I told her it was too late for explanations. I let myself into the house already braced for her voice, already braced for the argument.
But I didn’t get any.
"Faouzia." I called into the empty space.
Nobody answered me, and for a moment I stood in the entryway telling myself she was most definitely upstairs, ignoring me on purpose, making a point the way she liked to make points, by going quiet and letting the silence do the work she didn't want to do with words. I went up to check.
Her side of the closet was empty, and not in a way that looked like she packed in a hurry. The hangers were still lined up along the rod, spaced the way they'd always been spaced, which meant she'd taken the time to fold things properly. Her passport was gone from the drawer we both used. The ring I'd had made for her, my mother's stone reset into something new, wasn't in her jewelry box.
I went down to her studio next, and it was in the same state — the corkboard stripped bare, the shelf where she kept her sketchbooks left with nothing but the dust outlines of where they used to sit.
She hadn't stormed out to cool off somewhere. She'd planned this carefully and that realization made me feel something I would rather not name.
I told myself it didn't matter. She was emotional, she'd always been emotional, and this was simply the most dramatic thing she could do to make me chase her. She'd slept with my own brother and now she wanted me to feel guilty for reacting to it. I had proof of it, my brother— Cassian, had admitted to it and even apologised. And yet, she simply refused to be honest.
I called her anyway, mostly to confirm she'd landed somewhere and hadn't done anything stupid, and the call went straight to voicemail without a single ring.
By the second day of nothing, the irritation had started to curdle in my stomach. I called again between meetings and got the same automated greeting, and I sat there in my office afterward staring at a shipping contract I'd already read twice without absorbing a word of it, thinking about the fact that she'd left with no destination I knew of, no family to go to, nobody who'd take her in and keep her hidden from me if I decided to look.
I told myself I only cared because I needed to know where my wife was. That was all. A man was entitled to know where his wife had gone, regardless of what she'd done to deserve his contempt.
I came home on the fourth night meaning to change my shirt and go straight back to the office. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face, and that was when I saw something near the edge of the sink, half hidden behind the soap dispenser. A thin white plastic stick.
I picked it up without understanding what I was holding at first. Then I saw the two lines, and I stood there staring at them like they would transform into something meaningful.
Then I thought about the last few weeks.
Faouzia had been tired all the time. She had barely touched her coffee some mornings, and there were days when certain smells seemed to bother her. I'd noticed it, but I had never thought much about it. I had been too busy being angry with her.
My eyes went back to the test that confirmed that she was pregnant.
If the baby was mine, then she had been pregnant while I was punishing her for something she might not have done.
I immediately pushed the thought away.
The photographs were real. I had seen them with my own eyes.
But for the first time, I couldn't make the rest of it fit as easily as it had before.
If she was pregnant now, and she'd left four days ago, then the arithmetic wasn't complicated. It was mine, or it was my brother's, and I made myself consider the second possibility carefully, because it was the one that let me keep standing on solid ground. She could have been pregnant before any of this happened. The timing didn't prove anything. A positive test told me nothing about who the father was, and I was not the kind of man who reached conclusions without evidence.
But I kept coming back to the way she'd looked at me that night, and the question I hadn't let myself ask properly until now. What if she really hadn't known what I was accusing her of.
I didn't like where that question led, so I did what I always did with things I didn't like. I set it aside and told myself the photographs had been real, that I hadn't imagined any of it, that whatever confusion she'd shown me that night could have been guilt dressed up as innocence and she was better at this than I'd given her credit for. My brother wouldn't have lied to me about something like that. I'd built an entire month of decisions on the certainty that he hadn't.
None of it felt as solid as it had an hour ago.
I called her again. It went to voicemail, the same as every other time, and I stood there with the phone against my ear a few seconds longer than I needed to, listening to her recorded voice tell me to leave a message, before I finally lowered it.
I needed to find her. That was all I was going to focus on. I needed to know where she had gone, who she was with, and whether there was anything about this pregnancy that I had missed.
The photographs were still real. Faouzia had still betrayed me with my brother, and I wasn't going to let one pregnancy test make me forget that.
But as I stared at the test on the counter, I couldn't stop thinking about one question.
What if the baby was mine?
