A year after my best friend took my husband, she invited me to celebrate the baby she claimed was his.
The invitation arrived on a Tuesday afternoon.
Heavy ivory paper.
Embossed blue lettering.
A photograph of Sloane with one hand resting on her pregnant belly while my ex-husband, Grant Whitmore, kissed her temple.
Across the top were the words:
A Little Whitmore Is On The Way.
That alone would have been cruel enough.
But Sloane had added a handwritten note beneath it.
Rebecca, I really hope you come. I know motherhood never happened for you, but maybe celebrating our blessing will help you finally move on.
Then she drew a tiny heart.
I stood at my kitchen island staring at those words for so long that the ice in my coffee melted.
Two years earlier, I might have cried.
A year earlier, I might have ripped the invitation into pieces.
That afternoon, I laughed.
Because sitting beside Sloane’s invitation was a sealed report from Northbridge Reproductive Medicine.
And according to that report, Grant Whitmore had never been capable of fathering a child.
Not when he married me.
Not when we spent nearly five years trying to conceive.
And certainly not now.
The diagnosis was blunt.
Congenital non-obstructive azoospermia.
In plain English?
Grant had been sterile since birth.
I turned the page.
Attached behind it was the result of a second test.
Probability of paternity: 99.98%.
The father’s name was not Grant Whitmore.
It was his younger brother.
Elliot Whitmore.
I looked back at the photograph of Sloane smiling into the camera.
For a moment, all I could hear was the refrigerator humming.
Then I picked up my phone.
I texted her three words.
Wouldn’t miss it.
Grant and I had been married for seven years.
For most of them,
I believed we were happy.
He was handsome in the clean, expensive way men from old-money families often are. He knew how to enter a room and make people notice him without appearing to ask for attention.
His family owned Whitmore Development Group, one of the largest commercial property companies in our part of Connecticut.
