Chapter 1: Keep the Child, Lose the Father

Helen's POV

"Helen Davis, have you lost your mind? You know what condition your body is in. If you go through with this pregnancy, your chances of making it out alive are thirty percent — thirty percent. Are you really willing to throw your life away for a man?"

My best friend's voice was still ringing in my ears as I walked out of the hospital.

As if I didn't care about my own life.

But our marriage — mine and Kael's — had been a hollow shell for too long. He had always wanted a son. And if the child growing inside me could be the thing that finally brought him back, that made him choose home and choose me, then I was willing to try one more time.

I got into the car and called him.

He rarely came home as it was, and I knew better than to stake everything on a thirty-percent chance without talking to him first. Some things had to be said out loud, face to face. But the phone rang and rang, and he didn't pick up. That didn't surprise me. He almost never answered when I called.

After a long pause, a message came through: Something up?

My fingers trembled slightly as I typed back: Come home tonight if you can. I'd like to talk — about the baby.

He didn't reply.

I pulled a thin, joyless smile and started the car.

By the time I reached the villa, it was past eight. I pulled into the courtyard and cut the engine, and that was when I noticed Kael's car already parked in the adjacent space. He was home. A small, involuntary hope stirred in my chest as I grabbed my bag and stepped out.

Voices drifted from the living room — faint at first, then clearer as I approached. I recognized them both: Agatha, his mother, and Kael. I stopped just outside the doorway and stood in the shadow of the hall, listening.

"You were gone for over a month this time," Agatha was saying. "Off accompanying Ivy to her competitions and tours again, I suppose. If you really can't stand Helen, just divorce her and be done with it — I never thought much of her anyway. If it weren't for your grandfather insisting, what business did an orphan girl have marrying into the Nightingale family? But that's not even the point. The point is my grandchildren. You're away constantly — you and Helen barely see each other once a year. How am I supposed to get a grandson at this rate? If it comes to it, just have Ivy give you a son. As long as the child carries Nightingale blood, it doesn't matter which woman bears it."

"No." Kael's refusal was immediate and flat. "The risks of childbirth are too serious. Five years ago, Helen's labor went wrong — the baby was malpresented, they couldn't deliver naturally, and when they switched to a cesarean she hemorrhaged. She barely made it off the table. I'm not putting Ivy through that. Besides, Helen has already been through it once. She's more resilient. It has to be her."

I stood in the hallway and stopped breathing.

My hand closed around the prenatal report in my bag until the paper crumpled in my grip.

I had known for years that the reason Kael stayed away wasn't work. I had known about Ivy. But I had told myself — foolishly, stubbornly — that because he had never asked for a divorce, there must still be some small corner of his heart that held a place for me. That if I waited, if I gave him what he wanted, if I made myself indispensable enough, it would eventually be enough. I had known my body wasn't suited for another pregnancy, and I had been willing to risk it anyway, because I thought he might be worth it.

I understood now that I had been wrong.

He had spent years guarding Ivy from every discomfort, every risk, every shadow of pain — while standing right beside a woman he was fully prepared to send back to that same operating table. Not out of love. Not even out of indifference. Out of cold, practical calculation. In his eyes, I was not a wife. I was a vessel.

I looked down at my stomach, at the barely-there curve that held a life not yet fully formed, and something in me went very quiet and very certain. If they wanted to use my child as a tool, then I would take my child and go. I didn't need Kael. I had never needed Kael.

I didn't wait to hear the rest of their conversation. I turned and slipped away through the side corridor, taking the back stairs up to the second floor without a sound.

If there was anything left in this broken marriage that still mattered to me, it was Roxi. And if I was going to leave, I needed to know how she felt about it first.

I pushed open the door to her room. She hadn't gone to sleep yet — she was sitting on her bed in a little nightgown, freshly bathed, her hair loose around her shoulders. The small curve of her back looked unbearably sweet, and something in my chest softened at the sight of her.

This is the child I nearly died to bring into the world.

"Roxi," I said gently. "What are you up to?"

Her small body went rigid. She shoved something quickly under the blanket, then turned to look at me, and for just a moment her face was unguarded — startled and guilty at once. The expression lasted only a second before it hardened into something more familiar: displeasure.

"Mom, why didn't you knock?"

I blinked, but I wasn't angry. "You're right," I said, and smiled. "That was my mistake. You're a big girl now — I'll remember to knock from now on. What did you just hide under there?"

I glanced toward the blanket without thinking much of it, assuming it was a snack or a toy.

Roxi was not yet five years old, and she couldn't quite conceal the anxiety in her eyes. But the way she looked at me was guarded — the look of someone protecting a private world from an intruder. "I want to go to sleep," she said. "You can go, Mom."

The wariness in her face landed like a splinter.

She had been spending the last two years trailing after Kael, going along on every business trip, including this most recent one that had stretched past a month. I had missed her terribly. I had come to this room hoping to hold her, to talk to her, to find some small warmth at the end of a day that had stripped away nearly everything else.

I didn't push. "All right," I said. "Get some rest. And if you've been eating snacks, make sure you brush your teeth."

She pressed her lips together and said nothing.

I stepped back and pulled the door closed behind me.

And then I heard her voice from the other side of the door, bright and unguarded in a way it had never been with me: "That was just my mom. She walked right in without knocking — so annoying. She's nothing like Aunt Ivy. Aunt Ivy always has manners. I don't even want her to be my mom. I wish Aunt Ivy was my mom instead..."

The cold moved through me all at once, from my hands to my feet to the center of my chest. I pressed my back against the wall to keep from going down.

She had hidden her phone. She had been on a call with Ivy.

I stood there in the hallway and tried to understand how this had happened.

Five years ago, Roxi had come into the world in crisis — fragile, struggling, uncertain. I had given up a postgraduate placement at the medical school to stay with her, because nothing else had seemed to matter. For three years I had been beside her every day, coaxing her from a pale and failing infant into a bright-eyed, laughing little girl who ran toward me with her arms out. We had been inseparable. She had been my entire world.

And then the trips with Kael had started. Two years of being taken away, a few weeks at a time, until the child who came back to me was someone I had to knock to see.

Had Ivy said something to her? Had she been slowly, quietly reshaping the way Roxi saw me? Or had it simply been Kael's own contempt — worn so openly, for so long — that had taught our daughter to feel the same?