Page 36 of My Husband’s New Fiancée

We’d just made love. She was curled against me, tracing absent patterns against my skin with her fingertips.

“I want us to start a family,” she’d whispered. “I’m ready. I want a baby that’s half you and half me so badly.”

I told her I wanted the same thing.

Three weeks later, she vanished.

Do people whisper about babies in the dark when they’re already planning to disappear three weeks later?

To abandon everything behind them?

That doesn’t sound like her.

So how do I explain her return?

She looks untouched. No one survives something like that untouched.

“She’ll explain eventually,” Bianca murmurs against my shoulder. “Or maybe she won’t. But either way, it changes nothing between us.”

She tilts her face up toward mine.

“We can’t trust her anymore. We’re clearly not her priority now.”

Again, something about her words unsettles me.

“No,” I say slowly. “We’re not her priority anymore.”

Silence stretches between us.

Then she asks softly,

“Do you think we should still invite her to the wedding?”

The question jerks me violently back to reality.

The wedding.

I’m so fucked.

11. The Life I Wanted

Bianca

Dante is starting to ask questions.

I see it in the way he stares into space between conversations. In the way he sometimes answers without really listening.

His mind is somewhere else.

With her.

I need to keep the pressure on. Keep them from getting close again. Remind him that I’m his present.

And for that, I have one advantage she doesn’t.

I still have access to him. To his body.

I slowly straighten and swing myself onto his lap. My mouth finds his, soft and patient.