“What does she want?” I asked.
“She says she made a mistake. That we should give our relationship another try. That she panicked when she realized I might have a child but she’s ‘ready to accept that reality’ now and ‘be a family.’” He shook his head firmly. “I don’t care what she’s ready for. She lied to me about something that mattered more than anything. There’s no coming back from that kind of betrayal.”
I appreciated his conviction, even though a small part of me wondered how long it would last once the drama faded and life became routine again.
“Have you told your family?” I asked, changing the subject. “About the baby?”
Ethan’s parents had always been distant during our marriage—more concerned with their son’s career trajectory and professional achievements than his personal life. I’d met them maybe a dozen times in five years, always at formal occasions where conversation stayed safely surface-level.
“I told them,” Ethan said quietly. “My mother wants to meet her. She said something about ‘making sure the child is being raised in an appropriate environment.’”
“Absolutely not,” I said immediately.
“I told her the same thing,” he said, and I heard the firmness in his voice. “I said if she wanted to be a grandmother, she’d need to apologize to you first for all the dismissive things she said about our marriage, and she’d need to prove she could be respectful of your parenting choices. She hasn’t called back since.”
“Good,” I said, feeling oddly proud of him for setting that boundary.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while, watching our daughter sleep, both of us lost in our own thoughts about how much had changed in such a short time.
“Can I ask you something?” Ethan said eventually.
“Sure.”
“When you found out you were pregnant, before everything fell apart… were you happy?”
I thought about it honestly, remembering that moment in the bathroom with the pregnancy test, the surge of emotions that had flooded through me when I saw those two pink lines.
“I was terrified,” I admitted. “We’d been trying for almost a year with no success. I’d started to think maybe it just wasn’t going to happen for us, that maybe we’d need to consider other options. And then suddenly it did happen, and instead of feeling pure joy like I thought I would, I was scared out of my mind.”
“Scared of what?”
“That you weren’t ready. That your career would always come first, that every decision would be filtered through whether it helped or hurt your professional advancement. That I’d essentially be raising a baby alone even though I was married.” I looked at him directly. “Turns out I was right to be scared.”
Ethan flinched but didn’t argue or make excuses. “I’m sorry I made your fears come true instead of proving them wrong.”
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