Her Billionaire Said He Didn't Love His Pregnant Wife

Chapter 1

The caterer was forty minutes late and I was rearranging the passed appetizers for the third time when Cole's assistant found me behind the kitchen partition.

"The Sequoia team just walked in," Parker said. "Cole's still on a call."

"I'll handle it."

I wiped my hands on the towel tucked into my waistband — a habit from culinary school I'd never broken, even after I stopped calling myself a chef — and checked my reflection in the stainless steel door of the walk-in cooler.

Hair pulled back. Black dress. The earrings Cole bought me for our fourth anniversary that I wore to every Vantage event because they photographed well and he'd never notice if I didn't.

I looked like exactly what I was: the woman who made all of this work without anyone noticing she was working.

The Vantage annual fundraiser was my production from the floor up.

Two hundred guests in a converted warehouse south of Market, seated dinner for sixty at the center, cocktail hour wrapping the perimeter with a view of the Bay Bridge that cost more per square foot than most people's rent.

I'd picked the venue six months ago. I'd hired the florist, the lighting designer, the sommelier.

I'd written Cole's remarks, which he would deliver from note cards in his jacket pocket and pretend were off the cuff, pausing in the places I'd marked for laughter.

I'd seated the Sequoia partners next to the two portfolio founders most likely to charm them and across from the board member they already trusted.

I'd tasted every dish on tonight's menu in our kitchen at home two weeks ago, adjusted the salt on the braised short rib, and sent the corrections to the caterer — the same caterer who was now forty minutes late because his van had broken down on the 101.

None of this was in my job description. I didn't have a job description. I was Cole Prescott's wife. The whole thing was the job.

I crossed the main floor with two glasses of the Willamette Valley pinot noir I'd sourced for the wine pairing — a small-lot bottling from a producer who didn't sell to restaurants yet and wouldn't for another year, because I'd found her at a tasting in Dundee before anyone else had heard of her.

Good wine. I knew good wine. I knew good food and good rooms and good timing, and I'd spent six years putting all of it into someone else's name.

"David, Janet — so glad you made it." I handed them the glasses with the warm, precise smile I'd perfected for these rooms. "Cole's finishing up a call, he'll be right over. How was the drive down from Woodside?"

"Ivy, this space is stunning." David Nguyen looked around at the exposed steel beams, the pendant lights, the long communal tables dressed in linen I'd steamed myself that afternoon. "You always outdo yourself."

"The team helped." The team was me and Parker and a lighting company that sent the wrong fixtures at two p.m., which meant I'd spent an hour on a ladder in heels rehanging the correct ones while Parker held the base and pretended not to be terrified.

"Janet, I made sure the kitchen knows about the shellfish," I said. "Your entrée is the lamb."

Janet's face softened. "You remembered."

I remembered everything. That was my talent — or it had been, once, in kitchens where remembering meant knowing the exact moment to pull the crème br?lée, the precise ratio of acid to fat in a vinaigrette, the way a plate should look when it landed on a table and made someone close their eyes.

Now I remembered that Janet Nguyen was allergic to shellfish and that her husband preferred domestic pinot to Burgundy and that their daughter had just started at Stanford, which meant I should ask about her and then pivot to the fundraiser's education initiative before David checked his phone.

I did all of that. It took four minutes. David was engaged and Janet was smiling and I excused myself and moved on.

My clutch sat on the bar, tucked between two untouched whiskeys. Inside it, folded in half, was the ultrasound.

Seven weeks. I'd found out ten days ago, sitting on the bathroom floor of the Pac Heights townhouse at five in the morning while Cole slept two rooms away.

Two pink lines on a drugstore test I'd bought at the Walgreens on Fillmore because I couldn't go to the one near Cole's office where everyone knew us.

A blood draw at my OB confirmed it the next day.

Then the ultrasound, yesterday morning — a grainy black-and-white image of something that looked like a kidney bean and was, according to Dr. Pham, the size of a blueberry. Heartbeat strong. Everything on track.

I hadn't told anyone. Not Cole, not Val, not Simone.

I'd been carrying the image in my clutch for two days, waiting for the right moment.

Tonight felt right. After the dinner, after his speech, after the Sequoia team left satisfied.

I'd pull him to a corner, hand him the picture, and watch his face do the thing it did when something broke through the performance — the real smile, the one that lived behind the keynote version. I wanted to see it one more time.

I touched the clutch as I passed the bar. The ultrasound was a small hard rectangle through the leather. I kept walking.

Simone was near the windows.

She stood with a glass of the pinot, talking to Kieran Holt — Cole's co-founder, the CTO, the technical brain behind Vantage while Cole played vision and stage.

Kieran looked the way Kieran always looked: wiry, glasses slightly crooked, rumpled button-down under a blazer he'd clearly put on in the car.

Simone looked the way Simone always looked — polished, blonde, angular, the kind of woman who walked into a room and rearranged its gravity without trying.

We'd met freshman year of culinary school.

Thirteen years ago. She'd realized by junior year that she liked talking about food more than making it and pivoted to communications.

I'd realized I liked a boy named Cole Prescott more than I liked anything else and pivoted to him.

That was unfair — I'd loved cooking. I'd been good at it.

But Cole was a force, and forces pull you in, and by the time I looked up from his orbit I was twenty-five and married and the kitchen I worked in belonged to his caterers, not to me.

Simone had been there for all of it. The wedding.

The move to Pac Heights. The first Vantage fundraiser, which was forty people in a rented loft and I'd made the food myself because they couldn't afford a caterer.

She texted me every morning — a coffee cup emoji or a little sun, nothing more, just a signal that she was thinking of me.

She was the friend who showed up at midnight when I called because I was lonely in a house full of expensive things.

She was the only person I could say that to.

"There she is." Simone turned from Kieran and pulled me into a hug. She smelled like jasmine and the cold night outside. "This place looks incredible. You outdid yourself."

"Everyone keeps saying that."

"Because it's true." She held me at arm's length, studying my face. "You look tired."

"I hung lights for an hour in heels."

"Of course you did." She laughed and handed me her glass. "Drink."

"I can't." The words came out before I caught them.

Simone raised an eyebrow. "Can't, or won't?"

"Won't. I'm working." I handed the glass back. My heart was doing something fast and unwelcome. I hadn't planned to tell her. Not yet. Not before Cole.

She watched me for a beat too long. Simone was smart that way — she read faces the way I read kitchens. But she let it go. "Fine. Come find me after dinner. I want to hear about the catering disaster."

"How do you know about the catering disaster?"

"Because there's always a catering disaster and you always fix it and nobody ever knows." She squeezed my arm. "That's your whole thing, Ivy."

I watched her walk back toward Kieran. She was right. It was my whole thing.

Cole appeared from the hallway that led to the offices, phone still in his hand, jacket slightly crooked at the shoulder.

He looked good. He always looked good — tall and lean, dark hair kept short, the square jaw and half-smile that had gotten him onto magazine covers he pretended not to keep.

He scanned the room the way he always scanned a room: not looking for me, but confirming that everything was handled.

Our eyes met across thirty feet of well-dressed strangers.

I gave him a small nod. Handled. He nodded back and moved toward the Sequoia table.

I watched him shake David's hand, lean in to say something to Janet that made her laugh, drop into the easy warmth that made investors feel like they were already inside the circle.

He was good at this. The vision, the pitch, the charisma that made people write checks — that was Cole.

The wine, the seating chart, the place cards I'd written by hand because Parker's handwriting was uneven, the fact that David preferred domestic pinot and Janet couldn't eat shrimp — that was me.

I didn't resent it. That's the part that would make me angry later, angrier at myself than at him: I didn't resent it at the time.

I thought it was partnership. I thought we were building something together, and the fact that his name was on all of it and mine was on none of it was just how things worked.

He was the platform. I was the infrastructure. Infrastructure didn't need a byline.

The dinner went smoothly. Cole's remarks landed — he hit every joke I'd written, nailed the pivot to the fundraiser's cause with the sincerity I'd coached, and got a standing ovation from a room full of people who thought he was speaking from the heart.

He was, in a way. He believed in the cause.

He just didn't believe enough to write his own speech about it.