The cold tile had bitten through my skin by the time I heard my own breathing again. The water still ran in the sink, a sound I'd stopped hearing until silence made it loud. I pressed my palm flat against my belly, felt the faint swell beneath my fingers, and let myself feel the shape of what was growing there. Damon's child. Not a maybe. Not a fear. A fact, already rooting itself into my flesh like it knew it belonged.

I pushed myself up off the floor. My legs shook. The blood on my thigh had dried to a brownish crust, and I caught my reflection in the mirror—tangled honey-brown hair, hazel eyes too wide in a face I barely recognized. The woman looking back at me had been fucked raw by a stranger in a truck cab, and she'd loved every second of it, and she was still leaking his cum two hours later.

I turned the water off.

The silence rushed in to fill the space, and somewhere in it, I heard a sound that cut through everything—a thin, rising cry from down the hall. Mira. My body answered before my mind could catch up. The ache hit me in the same instant, a deep, throbbing pressure in my breasts that had nothing to do with Damon and everything to do with the three-month-old who was hungry.

I moved on autopilot, my bare feet silent on the hallway runner. Past the living room where Luke had said he'd be waiting. I didn't look in. I couldn't. The nursery door was cracked open, the yellow bulb inside spilling a wedge of dim light across the floor, and Mira's cry sharpened into a full wail as I pushed through.

She was standing in her crib, her tiny fists clenched, her face screwed up and red. The humid air hit me—talc and warm milk and that particular smell of baby that had become the background of my entire existence. I crossed to her, and my shirt was already wet, two dark circles spreading across the thin cotton where my milk had let down at the sound of her crying.

"Shh, baby, shh." My voice came out raw, scraped. I lifted her, and she was so small, so impossibly fragile in my hands, her little body arching toward me with the single-minded desperation of hunger. Her mouth opened, searching, and I didn't think. I just pulled my shirt aside and guided her to my breast.

The latch was immediate. The suction was a shock of release so intense I hissed through my teeth, a sound I couldn't hold back. The pressure that had been building in my chest for the last hour finally found its outlet, and I felt the milk let down in a hot rush, felt Mira's throat working as she gulped.

"God," I breathed, swaying slightly. My hand cradled the back of her head, her fine baby hair soft as silk against my fingers. Her small hand curled against my skin, her fingers splayed over the swell of my breast, and I looked down at her and felt something crack open in my chest.

She had no idea. She was three months old. She didn't know that her mother had just destroyed her family, that the milk she was drinking was laced with another man's scent, that her mother's belly was already swelling with a half-sibling she'd never asked for.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

I froze.

Mira kept nursing, oblivious, her tiny throat working, her hand still curled against my skin. But every muscle in my body had locked, my breath caught in my chest, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Luke. I knew the weight of his footsteps. I'd known it for seven years. The way he walked was methodical, even, unhurried—the gait of a man who never rushed anything because nothing in his life had ever required him to. And those footsteps had stopped. Right outside the nursery door. Right where he could see me through the crack, if he looked.

I didn't turn around.

I couldn't.

I stood there, Mira in my arms, my breast bared, milk dripping from the corner of her mouth, and I felt his presence like a weight pressing against my back. The yellow bulb cast long shadows across the row of metal cribs—the empty ones, the ones that would never be filled by another Garcia child. I'd thought about that, once. About giving Leo a little brother or sister. About the sound of two children laughing in the backyard instead of one.

Now Leo would have a half-brother. Or a half-sister. And the child in my belly would never know what it was like to have Luke as a father.

Mira's small hand uncurled from my breast and found my collarbone, her fingers patting blindly at my skin. She was slowing down, her gulps becoming less urgent, her eyes drifting half-closed in that milk-drunk haze that always made my heart ache.

The silence stretched.

I could hear him breathing. Just barely. The soft in-and-out of air through his nose, the sound I'd fallen asleep to for years, the sound I'd once found so comforting that I couldn't drift off without it. Now it made my skin crawl. Now it made me want to run.

He didn't knock.

He didn't speak.

He just stood there, on the other side of the door, and I knew—I knew—that he was trying to decide whether to come in. Whether to confront me. Whether to ask the question that had been hanging in the air since he'd seen the cum on my thigh and smelled another man on my skin.

I shifted Mira to my other breast, a practiced motion born of three months of feeding her. The latch was harder this time, her mouth searching, and I had to guide her, my fingers gentle on her jaw until she found her grip. The release was less intense this time, the pressure already mostly drained, but I still felt the pull deep in my chest, that strange, primal sensation of my body giving itself to my child.

My body. Which had also given itself to Damon.

I closed my eyes. The image came unbidden—his hands on my hips, his cock buried so deep inside me that I'd felt him in my womb, felt him stretching me past the point of pain into something I'd never known existed. The way he'd looked at me when he'd finally pulled free, his dark eyes wild, his chest heaving, cum dripping from his softening cock and my own blood smeared across his thighs.

I'd never felt more alive.

And I'd never felt more alone than I did right now, standing in the nursery with my daughter at my breast and my husband on the other side of a door that might as well have been a wall of glass.

"Elena."

His voice came through the door, muffled but clear. Low. Flat. The voice of a man who'd been holding himself together by a thread and had finally decided to speak.

I didn't answer. I couldn't. My throat had closed up, and the only sound I could make was the soft, rhythmic gulping of Mira at my breast.

"Elena, I know you can hear me."

I pressed my lips to the top of Mira's head. Her hair smelled like baby shampoo and warm scalp, and I breathed her in, trying to anchor myself to something real, something that wasn't the wreckage of my marriage or the new life growing inside me.

"I'm not going to come in," Luke said. "I just—I need you to know that I'm not going to pretend I didn't see what I saw."

A pause. The sound of him shifting his weight.

"I'm not going to pretend I didn't smell him on you."

My eyes burned. I blinked, and a tear slid down my cheek, dropping onto Mira's blanket. She didn't notice. She just kept nursing, her tiny fist pressed against my breast, her eyes closed in blissful ignorance.

"I'm going to be in the living room," Luke said. "When you're ready to tell me the truth—the whole truth—you know where to find me."

The footsteps retreated. Slow. Heavy. Each one landing like a nail being driven into a coffin.

I stood there, Mira in my arms, and I listened to my husband walk away from me, and I knew that whatever came next, nothing would ever be the same. The lie I'd told—the fall, the blood, the excuse—had been transparent from the start. He'd known. He'd always known. And now he was giving me the chance to confess, to rip the bandage off, to tell him everything.

But how could I tell him everything? How could I explain Damon? How could I make him understand that I'd never felt my body truly come alive until a stranger had torn it open in the cab of his truck?

How could I tell my husband that I was carrying another man's child?

Mira finished nursing. Her mouth went slack, milk dribbling down her chin, and she let out a soft, satisfied sigh that was so small, so innocent, that it broke something in me. I lifted her to my shoulder, patting her back gently, feeling the tiny burp that followed, the warm weight of her against my chest.

The yellow bulb flickered. One of the cribs cast a shadow that looked like bars.

I looked down at my daughter, at her dark lashes fanned against her cheeks, at her rosebud mouth already curving into a dream-smile, and I thought about the child in my belly. About the life I was about to bring into a family that was already falling apart. About the two children who would grow up with the knowledge that their mother had shattered everything.

Mira's hand found my finger and curled around it, her grip surprisingly strong for such a tiny thing. She held on, even in sleep, even as I swayed with her in the dim light of the nursery, even as the silence pressed in around us like a living thing.

I didn't know what I was going to do.

But I knew I couldn't stay in this room forever.

I knew I couldn't keep hiding.

And I knew—with a certainty that settled into my bones like cold water—that when I finally walked out of this nursery and faced my husband, the truth would come out. All of it. The affair. The pregnancy. The way my body had betrayed our marriage in the most fundamental way possible.

Mira stirred against my shoulder, her breath warm on my neck. I held her tighter, pressing her close, trying to memorize the feeling of her in my arms before everything changed.

Because everything was about to change.

And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The footsteps did not retreat. They stopped, and I heard the creak of the floorboards as he shifted his weight, and I knew he was still there, on the other side of the door, waiting. The silence stretched, broken only by Mira's small, gulping sounds at my breast, and I did not turn around. But I knew he was still there, and that the next moment—his knock, his voice, his hand on the door—would change everything.