Chapter 2

The next evening, Sarah insisted on a "family dinner." The table was set with our finest china, candles flickering, casting long shadows on the walls. Mark was there. She introduced him as an "old family friend" who wanted to meet the children.

He was pale and thin, with a weak smile that didn't reach his eyes. Looking at him, I felt a roiling disgust in the pit of my stomach. This was the man who held a piece of me inside him. This was the man who had fathered these children with my wife, using my body to do it.

Sarah was a perfect picture of maternal bliss, fussing over the twins, cutting their food into tiny pieces, wiping their mouths with a napkin. She laughed and chatted, playing the role of the happy wife and mother for Mark's benefit. The entire scene was a grotesque play, and I was the unwilling audience.

I sat in silence, pushing my food around my plate. The twins, Luke and Annie, watched me with an unnerving, calculating intelligence in their eyes. They were not innocent children, but tiny reflections of their mother's cunning.

"You're not eating," Luke said, his voice loud in the strained silence. He pointed his fork at me. "Mommy says you're sad because you can't be a real daddy."

I froze, my hand tightening around my own fork. The words were a direct hit, a calculated jab. I looked at Sarah, but she just gave a little, helpless shrug, as if to say, kids say the darnedest things.

She had fed him that line. She was using her son, this child born of her betrayal, as another weapon against me. I felt a surge of cold anger. These weren't just children caught in a mess, they were active participants, pawns taught to be cruel.

Later, as I was clearing the table, I went into the guest bathroom that Mark had used. On the counter, next to the sink, was a silver-plated pillbox, engraved with the initial 'M'. I knew I shouldn't, but a morbid curiosity I couldn't control took over. I opened it.

Inside were several pills, but also a folded piece of paper. It was a prescription receipt. The name on it was Mark, but the medication was for post-transplant anti-rejection therapy.

The proof was right there, cold and clinical. It was my body part they were trying to stop his from rejecting. The violation felt so profound, so intimate, that I felt a wave of nausea and had to grip the sink to steady myself.

I walked back into the dining room just in time to see Sarah place a gentle hand on Mark's arm. Her touch was proprietary, intimate. She leaned in and whispered something in his ear, and he gave her that weak, grateful smile again.

They looked like a couple. A sick, twisted, but devoted couple. They were so wrapped up in their own drama, their own shared history and secrets, that I was just a ghost in my own home, a provider of resources and, apparently, spare parts.

I watched them, a coldness spreading through my chest, extinguishing the last embers of my grief. The heartbreak was gone, replaced by something hard and sharp. I looked at Sarah, at her beautiful, lying face, and I didn't see the woman I had loved for five years. I saw an enemy. I saw a target.

That night, lying alone in the guest room, I didn't cry. I made a plan. I would not just leave. I would dismantle her world, piece by piece, just as she had dismantled mine. The fight for my self-preservation had begun.