The color left his face so fast I thought he might faint. He stood up so abruptly his chair screeched against the floor. “That’s impossible! You can’t… The doctors said… We spent years trying!”
“The doctors said the probability was small,” I interrupted, looking him dead in the eye. “They never said ‘impossible.’ You were the one who decided I was ‘defective.’ You were the one who told me I was useless because I couldn’t give you an heir.”
The memory of that final night flashed between us—him, glass in hand, telling me Cassandra would never put him through the “hell” of a childless marriage.
“Whose is it?” he demanded, his voice trembling with a mix of rage and shock.
I felt a surge of righteous power. “It’s yours, Brandon. Do the math. He was conceived weeks before you left—before you started parading Cassandra around like a trophy.”
Brandon collapsed into his chair, his perfect hair disheveled. “A son… My son…” He looked at me with a frantic, desperate hunger. “Abigail, this changes everything. We can’t do this. We have to try again. For the baby.”
“No, Brandon.” I signed the paper with a flourish. “This changes nothing. You wanted this divorce because I couldn’t give you a child. Well, I’m giving you one, but you’ve lost the mother. Forever.”
He shouted, he pleaded, he threatened. But I simply adjusted my emerald coat, handed over the papers, and walked out. I left that powerful man defeated by the very arrogance he had used to crush me.
The months that followed were my “New Beginning.” I moved into a sun-drenched apartment and went back to my first love: gra
