Six months after our divorce, my ex-husband showed up at my door with his fiancée and a wedding invitation in hand—but the second he saw the newborn in my arms, all the color drained from his face, and the perfect life he thought he’d built started falling apart right in front of me.

Nobody visited without texting first. Maya would never just show up and ring twice. I hadn’t ordered food. I barely knew my neighbors.

The bell rang again.

I stood slowly, one hand bracing my abdomen, the other pulling my robe tighter across my chest. Every nerve in my body felt lit up. There is a kind of fear that only belongs to women alone in apartments. It lives in doorbells, in footsteps outside the hall, in the sound of a lock turning somewhere nearby.

I slid the chain on, opened the door an inch, and looked through the crack.

A man in a dark tailored suit stood in the hallway.

Beside him was a woman in a cream trench coat holding a thick ivory envelope with gold embossing.

For one split second I thought the pain meds were making me hallucinate.

Then the man lifted his eyes, and my blood turned to ice.

Ethan.

My ex-husband.

And beside him—elegant, polished, smiling like she was posing for a magazine profile—stood Victoria, his fiancée.

She extended the envelope first.

“We’re getting married,” she said warmly. “And we thought it was only right to invite you.”

Behind me, my newborn son made a small, sleepy sound.