Chapter 1

The phone rang, a sharp, unwelcome sound in the quiet of my office. I glanced at the caller ID. Olivia.

A smile touched my lips. I imagined her at home, her hand resting on her round belly where our son was growing. Six months. After years of heartbreak, failed treatments, and quiet despair, we were finally six months pregnant. A miracle.

"Hey, honey," I answered, leaning back in my chair. "Everything okay? Did you pick out a color for the nursery yet? I' m still team blue."

Silence.

Not the playful silence I expected, but a heavy, dead-air kind of quiet.

"Olivia?" I said, sitting up straight. "Are you there?"

Her voice, when it came, was a ghost. "Ethan... can you come to the hospital? St. Jude' s."

My heart stopped. "The hospital? What' s wrong? Is it the baby?"

My mind raced through a thousand terrible possibilities. A fall. A complication. Pre-term labor. I was already grabbing my keys, my half-finished report forgotten on the screen.

"Just... come," she whispered, and the line went dead.

The drive was a blur of traffic and a frantic, pounding pulse in my ears. I ran through the automatic doors of St. Jude' s, my eyes scanning for her. I found her not in the maternity ward, where I expected, but in a small, sterile waiting room on the surgical floor.

She was sitting on a plastic chair, her face pale, her eyes empty.

And her belly...

It was gone.

The gentle, six-month swell that had become the center of my universe was just... gone. She was wearing a loose-fitting sweatshirt, but there was no hiding the flatness, the awful emptiness where our child should have been.

"Olivia," I breathed, the word catching in my throat. "What happened? Where is he? Where' s our son?"

I reached for her, but she flinched away.

"Don' t," she said, her voice flat. "It' s done."

"Done?" I repeated, my mind refusing to process the words. "What' s done? Olivia, talk to me. Was there an accident? Did you lose him?"

The pain of that thought was immense, but the truth was infinitely worse.

She finally looked at me, and her eyes were cold, distant. "I had an abortion, Ethan."

The world tilted. The air left my lungs. For a moment, I was sure I had misheard. It was impossible. It was a nightmare.

"What did you say?"

"I ended the pregnancy," she said, her voice gaining a sliver of defiance. "I had to."

"Had to?" My voice cracked, rising to a shout. People in the waiting room stared. I didn't care. "Why? Why would you do that? He was healthy! We were so close!"

"He was bad luck," she said simply, as if explaining the weather.

I stared at her, dumbfounded. "Bad luck? What are you talking about? That' s our son, Olivia, not a broken mirror!"

"Liam is in here," she said, her gaze drifting toward the ICU wing. "He was in a car accident. A terrible one. It happened right after we had our final check-up, the one where they said the baby was perfect."

Liam. Her college sweetheart. The "one that got away" who had lingered like a ghost in the corners of our marriage for years.

"What does Liam have to do with our baby?" I demanded, my hands clenched into fists.

"Don' t you see?" she said, her voice filled with a terrifying, twisted logic. "The baby... he was too perfect. All our good luck went to him. And it caused this. It hurt Liam. I had to get rid of the bad luck. I had to save him."

I felt a cold dread wash over me, colder than any grief I had ever known. This wasn't a woman in mourning. This was something else. Something broken and terrifying.

"You killed our son," I said, the words tasting like poison. "You killed our son... for him? For a man you haven't been with in over a decade?"

"You don't understand our connection," she snapped, her eyes flashing with anger for the first time. "He needs me. I couldn' t let some... thing... get in his way."

"Thing?" I whispered, the sound raw. "He was our child, Olivia. Our miracle baby. We spent every dollar we had, we cried, we prayed for him."

"And it was a mistake," she said, her voice dropping back to that chilling monotone. "All of it."

She stood up, pulling her sweatshirt tighter around her empty frame. She looked right through me, her focus already somewhere else. On him.

I looked at this woman, my wife, the person I had loved and trusted, and I saw a stranger. The love in my heart curdled into something black and heavy. It wasn't just that our son was gone. It was that she had chosen to kill him. And in that moment, she had killed our marriage, too.

A profound, bottomless despair opened up inside me. The bright future I had imagined just an hour ago-first steps, scraped knees, bedtime stories-had been wiped away by an act of madness I couldn't comprehend. My son was gone. My wife was a monster. I was completely and utterly alone.

---