She had swallowed her doubts, rationalizing his distance as the brutal pressure of scaling Walker Development into a regional real estate titan. She had protected his ego, covered for his absences, and tried to love him enough to fill whatever void had opened up inside him.
Until twenty minutes ago.
Twenty minutes ago, standing in the kitchen while Ethan and Lauren laughed their way through the front door, Grace had quietly pressed a single button on the side of her phone hidden deep inside her apron pocket.
She hadn’t called her brothers. She hadn’t screamed or made a scene.
She had sent three words across encrypted, secure channels that bypassed normal cellular routing.
I need you.
They were already on their way.
Three hours earlier, long before the champagne had been chilled and the roasted tenderloin had been arranged with sprigs of fresh rosemary, Grace had been standing alone in the sprawling, high-ceilinged kitchen of their Myers Park home.
She had spent the entire afternoon preparing everything herself. No catering staff. No hired help. She had wanted it to feel like the old days—back when they lived in a cramped, drafty apartment off South Boulevard where they cooked pasta on a two-burner stove and talked about the future until three in the morning.
Five years.
Five years since she had walked down the aisle toward a nervous young entrepreneur who could barely afford the modest lakefront venue where they had exchanged vows. Back then, Ethan had not owned Walker Development. He had owned a battered laptop, a used pickup truck with a rusted tailgate, forty thousand dollars in high-interest business debt, and a relentless, burning dream.
Grace had loved him before the money.
She had sat beside him on wobbly wooden chairs while he pitched skeptical investors who laughed him out of the room. She had driven him to the emergency room at two in the morning when his mother got sick and the insurance policy hadn’t cleared yet. When his first major commercial project nearly collapsed because of a cash-flow crisis, Grace had quietly taken her grandmother’s heirloom diamond necklace to a discreet appraiser in Uptown and sold it to cover payroll.
Ethan never knew.
She had never wanted him to feel indebted to her. She believed in his pride, believing that his success would be their shared victory, a monument to the partnership they had forged in the trenches of early adulthood.
Tonight, Grace had planned to give him something far more important than another conventional anniversary gift, something that should have cemented their bond forever.
Inside a small cream-colored velvet box resting beside his plate on the dining table was an ultrasound photograph.
Their baby.
