Divorced By My Billionaire Ex, Pregnant With His Twins

Olivia POV

Third time. Third time on this table, feet in the stirrups, staring at the ceiling tile with the water stain shaped like a fist, waiting for the doctor to extract my eggs again.

I remember the nurse's shoes crossing the floor toward me two years ago, slow and careful, the sound of someone about to say words that would end a pregnancy I'd already picked a name for. Damian's chair sat empty beside my bed that day — he'd had a call he couldn't move — and I told him it was fine, don't worry about it, and bled alone into a hospital gown while a stranger held my hand instead of my husband. I remember thinking, even then, some part of me still made excuses for him before he'd even asked for one.

I wake up with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, the way I do every time that memory finds me at four in the morning.

This morning we get the results — whether the embryo fertilized or failed again. Today, I tell myself, will be different.

Well… I've told myself that every time for five years — every anniversary he forgot, every dinner I ate alone across from an empty chair, every gift I wrapped and watched him open without really looking at it. We married for the families, for the business. Damian has never been unkind. He provides everything, treats me with perfect respect, never once embarrasses me in public. He just never loved me the way I fell in love with him. When the Sterlings started pressing for an heir and natural conception failed, he was the one who suggested IVF. Duty, not romance. "The company needs an heir." I told myself it meant he finally saw a future with me. I've built an entire marriage out of telling myself today will be different. I get dressed anyway. I always get dressed anyway.

The waiting lounge at Lumen Fertility smells like lavender and recycled air. My phone buzzes as I sit down.

Running behind. Stuck at the Ashcombe walkthrough with the design team. Meet you there — save me a seat. — D

The Ashcombe. Sterling Group's newest hotel property, five minutes from the clinic, still mid-renovation, the kind of site visit that usually eats an entire morning. I read the text twice, and something in me — some small, stupid, hopeful thing that's survived five years of exactly this — decides that if he can't come to me today, of all days, I can go to him instead. Just for ten minutes. Just to walk back together, so that whatever the results say, we hear them side by side.

I leave the lounge, take the elevator down, and drive the five minutes to the Ashcombe myself.

The lobby is half-draped in construction plastic, chandeliers wrapped in padding, a skeleton crew moving furniture under low winter light. A young woman at the concierge desk, badge still crooked from a rush that morning, tells me Mr. Sterling is up on nine, private suite, and waves me toward the elevator without a second thought — I'm still Mrs. Sterling here, still recognized in every building his family half-owns.

The ninth floor is quiet, unfinished, most of the doors still taped shut for paint. Number 904 is cracked open an inch, housekeeping’s cart abandoned in the hall outside it like whoever pushed it there left in a hurry.

I hear her laugh before I understand what I’m hearing.

“Damian.” Soft. Pleased. Nothing about a design walkthrough in it at all.

I push the door the rest of the way open before I’ve decided to.

Talia sits on the edge of the long walnut conference table that dominates the unfinished suite, completely bare, legs spread wide and facing the door. A discarded pillow from the nearby seating area is tucked under her lower back; she stretches against it with lazy, deliberate pleasure, spine arching as Damian stands between her thighs with his back to me, trousers shoved down just far enough, driving into her in hard, steady thrusts that make the heavy table shift against the floor. Her hands grip the edge behind her for leverage. Every time he bottoms out she lets out a low, broken sound—“Ooh… uuuh… fuck yeaa…”—head tipping back, dark hair spilling over her shoulders. His hands hold her hips in place so he can pull her onto him harder. The wet slap of skin on skin fills the room. His shirt hangs open. The Ashcombe blueprints still lie rolled on a chair beside his discarded jacket like a prop no one bothered to hide. She rocks forward to meet every thrust, grinding against him, and he groans her name into the side of her neck—rough, hungry, nothing like the controlled man who has shared my bed for five years.

Talia Duval. I know her face before I know anything else about her, because I’ve spent five years learning it from a single photograph I found in the back of a desk drawer and never mentioned. She was a family friend’s daughter once, the girl Damian grew up beside at the same parties and the same summer houses before she left for Paris at twenty-three chasing something that photographed better than a life with him ever would. I know the shape of her story the way you know a scar isn’t yours but still ache when it’s touched—the modeling career that never quite became one, the engagement that fell apart somewhere overseas, the quiet return to a city that used to be hers before it was ever mine. I’ve spent five years being told, without either of them ever saying it out loud, that I was the version of Damian’s life that happened after her, not instead of her.

She sees me first. Her whole body doesn’t freeze in shame; instead she looks pleased, almost languid, stretching herself more fully against the pillow, dark eyes half-lidded and unapologetic. She doesn’t cover her face or her body. 

Damian is the one who moves first, and there’s nothing graceful in it. He’s up, pulling out, reaching for his shirt, and the first thing out of his mouth isn’t my name.

“What are you doing here?” His voice comes out sharp, almost accusing, like I’m the one who’s done something wrong by finding him. “You were supposed to be at the clinic. I told you I’d meet you there.”

I lift one hand and cover part of my face, fingers pressing against my cheek and the corner of my mouth. The shame is automatic and physical—heat flooding my neck, my ears, the back of my eyes.

“You didn’t come,” I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I feel it. “So I came to you.”

“You should have waited.” He says it fast, like the sentence has been sitting loaded in him for weeks. “You should have just—Olivia, this isn’t something you were supposed to walk into. If you’d stayed put like I asked—”

“Like you asked.” Something in my chest that’s been folding quietly in on itself for five years finally finishes folding. “You’re angry at me for finding you.”

“I’m not angry.” He drags a hand down his face, and for a second something that might actually be shame moves through his expression before he catches it and puts it away again. “I’m—Olivia, I didn’t want you to see this. Not like this.”

“That’s not the same as being sorry it happened.”

He doesn’t answer that. He doesn’t have to. His silence answers it for me, the same silence I’ve spent five years learning to translate, and this time the translation isn’t ambiguous at all.

Behind him, Talia still hasn’t moved to cover herself. She remains stretched against the pillow, one hand trailing absently along her own thigh, expression calm and faintly satisfied. She doesn’t defend herself, doesn’t gloat, doesn’t even look at Damian. She simply watches me with that same quiet, pleased stillness, as if the interruption is only mildly inconvenient. She simply holds my gaze for a beat, then murmurs, soft and clear,

“Maybe you should go.”

I don't look at her again. I look at him one more time and I don't say anything else at all.

I turn and walk out.

I can't believe what I just saw.

Three steps into the hallway, my legs forget how to be legs. My shoulder finds the wall, hard, and I stay there a second longer than I mean to, breathing through my mouth because my nose has already started to betray me. I fix my eyes on the abandoned housekeeping cart — a folded towel, a bottle of glass cleaner, something ordinary to hold onto — and make myself keep moving. Past the taped-shut doors. Past my own name still hanging in the air of that room behind me, the way she said it, soft and wrecked and nothing like the way I say it.