I am six weeks postpartum, stitched together, leaking milk, running on alarms and instinct. Three newborns have erased time. My body aches in places I didn’t know could ache. I am Lena Cross, twenty-nine, and I feel ancient. And this is when my husband decides to end everything.
Victor Cross enters in a tailored gray suit, smelling of money and impatience. He doesn’t ask about the babies. Doesn’t look at the monitor. He drops a folder on the bed with a sound that feels legal, final. Divorce papers. He says my name like a nuisance. His eyes move over my body with open disgust.
“Look at you,” he says, as if commenting on a failed product. He calls me a scarecrow. Says I’ve destroyed his image. A CEO needs elegance, not “postpartum decay.”
I try to speak through exhaustion. “I just had three children. Yours.”
“And you let yourself go doing it,” he replies calmly, like I missed a deadline.
He announces the affair without shame. Maya Reed appears in the doorway—twenty-two, polished, confident, expensive. Victor wraps an arm around her and explains the settlement like a favor. I can keep the house in Greenwich, he says, as if discarding clutter.