Her name was Vanessa.
And the worst part was not even the affair itself.
It was discovering that his entire family already knew.
By the time the truth finally exploded into the open, I was too raw for screaming. I expected shame. Anger. At the very least, some effort to pretend they understood what they had done to me.
Instead, in my mother-in-law Evelyn Carter’s living room, under bright lights and fake respectability, she looked straight at me and delivered her decree like she was announcing something practical.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” she said coldly. “The one who gives birth to a boy will remain in this family. If it’s a girl, she can go.”
For a second, I couldn’t even breathe.
To them, a woman’s value could be measured by the anatomy of a child she had not even delivered yet.
I turned to Michael, desperate in that final, humiliating way you are right before love dies. I waited for him to say something. Anything. To tell his mother she had gone too far. To remind the room that I was his wife, not some contestant in a bloodline competition.
He said nothing.
