Chapter 2

"Your husband said your pregnancy was unstable. He was sure you wouldn't risk taking a flight."

The woman tilted her head, looking at me.

She got out of the cab, one hand protecting her belly, the other holding a bag of fresh cherries.

Ethan immediately stepped between us, shielding her.

"Chloe, listen to me."

I ignored him.

"What is your name?" I asked her.

The woman shifted the cherries to her other hand and smiled.

"Hope. But I guess you already knew that from my posts. Hasn't Ethan mentioned me to you?"

Ethan whipped his head around and glared at her.

"Hope! Shut up!"

"Why should I?" she snapped. "She was going to find out sooner or later. How long were you planning to hide this? Until I gave birth?"

Ethan gasped. He turned back to me, panicking.

"Chloe, she’s just an employee from a partner company. We've just had a lot of contact during this business trip."

"An employee who calls you 'husband'?" I interrupted.

Beside him, Hope was looking down at her phone, her thumb sliding rapidly across the screen.

Two seconds later, my phone dinged.

Her account had updated again.

It was a candid photo. The angle was from where she was standing. In the frame, Ethan stood in front of me, covered in sweat, his mouth half-open.

The caption read: "It’s so funny watching my husband get caught red-handed."

She was live-posting this. She was turning my shock and humiliation into gossip for her thirty thousand followers.

"Are you posting this online?" I asked.

"Yeah. It’s my pregnancy diary account," Hope said openly, showing me her screen. The username was *Hope_mommytobe*.

"I have thirty thousand followers now. Everyone loves my daily pregnancy updates. The post where Ethan took me to my ultrasound did the best. Over a thousand comments."

The sweat on Ethan's forehead was dripping like he was in a sauna.

"Hope, stop talking nonsense! You're going to ruin me!"

"What did I say that was nonsense?" Hope raised her voice. "Last month, during my 20-week anatomy scan, the technician said it was a boy, and you literally cried tears of joy. Did I make that up too?"

He cried.

This man, who had only accompanied me to one prenatal visit in seven months—and was thirty minutes late for that one—had cried tears of joy for another woman.

I looked down at my own belly.

"Ethan."

He flinched when I called him by his first name.

"Is this the business trip you talked about? You came here to be her labor support?"

He swallowed hard.

"The work is real. The project is indeed here."

"Then what about her? What is she to you?"

"Chloe, it’s more complicated than you think."

Hope observed me. She took a step closer.

"Mrs. Sterling, you're heavily pregnant too. It must be exhausting to stand out here."

She pulled a key card out of her pocket.

"Why don't we go upstairs and talk? Since you're already here. The room is big enough. Ethan booked an executive suite."

Ethan reached out to grab the key card, but he missed. She stepped back and slipped it back into her pocket.

Then, she leaned in close to my ear.

"Ethan doesn't have the guts to tell you the truth. But don't worry. I do."

0