CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AUbrEE
The lakeside house smelled like mothballs and memories I'd spent years trying to forget.
I stood in the doorway with my single suitcase, staring at the same floral wallpaper that had witnessed every summer of my childhood.
My parents had retired to Arizona three years ago, leaving this place to collect dust and hold ghosts.
They'd offered it to Tristen and me as a weekend retreat dozens of times, but I'd always found excuses.
Too busy with work. Too far from the city.
Too many reminders of the girl I used to be before fertility treatments turned me into someone I barely recognized.
Now here I was, hiding from my life in the same rooms where I'd hidden from thunderstorms as a child.
"You sure you don't want me to stay?" Collette hovered behind me, her car still running in the gravel driveway. She'd driven me the three hours from the city without asking questions, just handed me tissues and let me stare out the window in silence.
"I'm sure." I dropped my suitcase on the worn hardwood floor. "I need to be alone for a while."
"Alone alone, or alone where you answer my calls?"
"Alone where I answer your calls." I managed something that might have been a smile. "I promise I'm not going to do anything stupid. I just need to figure out who I am when I'm not Tristen Wickham's wife."
Collette pulled me into a fierce hug, her arms tight around my shoulders. "You're Aubree fucking Hale. That's who you've always been. Don't let him or that manipulative bitch make you forget it."
I held onto her longer than I should have, breathing in the familiar scent of her shampoo and trying to memorize the feeling of being held by someone who loved me without conditions or complications.
"Call me every day," she said when she finally pulled back. "And eat something. The fridge is probably empty, but there's a grocery store about fifteen minutes down the road."
"I know. I spent eighteen summers here, remember?"
"I remember you spending eighteen summers reading romance novels on the dock and refusing to learn how to fish."
"Fishing is boring and cruel."
"Fishing is a life skill."
"So is knowing when to leave." I squeezed her hand. "Go home, Collette. I'll be fine."
She didn't look like she believed me, but she left anyway, her taillights disappearing down the tree-lined road until I was truly, completely alone.
The silence was deafening.
I spent the first three days in a haze that felt like grief and sickness combined.
I slept fourteen hours at a stretch, waking only to eat crackers and drink water before collapsing back into the guest bedroom I'd claimed as my own.
The master bedroom, with its view of the lake and its queen-sized bed, felt too much like a space meant for couples.
I couldn't stomach the thought of spreading out alone in sheets that smelled like lavender sachets and broken promises.
My phone buzzed constantly. Tristen's name lit up the screen every few hours, a steady stream of messages I couldn't bring myself to read.
On the fourth day, I finally looked at them.
Please let me know you're safe.
Aubree, I'm so sorry. I know those words mean nothing right now, but I need you to know I'm saying them.
I've asked Oakleigh to leave the house. She's staying at a hotel with medical supervision.
I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm not asking for anything. I just need to know you're okay.
Your sister says you're at your parents' lake house. I won't come unless you ask me to. But please, just one word. Just tell me you're alive.
I love you. I know you don't believe that right now. I know my actions made it impossible to believe. But I love you, Aubree. I have loved you for eight years and I will love you until I stop breathing.
There were forty-seven more messages after that one. I didn't read them.
I turned off my phone and shoved it in the nightstand drawer, underneath a Bible that had been there since before I was born.
On the fifth day, I got out of bed and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror.
The woman staring back at me was a stranger. Puffy eyes ringed with dark circles. Skin that looked gray and lifeless under the harsh fluorescent light. Hair that hadn't been washed in nearly a week, hanging in limp, greasy strands around a face I barely recognized.
This was what I'd become. This was what four years of fertility treatments and eight months of emotional torture had reduced me to. A shell. A ghost. A woman so consumed by her desperate desire to be a mother that she'd lost herself entirely in the process.
No more.
The thought rose up from somewhere deep in my gut, fierce and sudden and utterly unexpected. I gripped the edge of the sink and stared at my reflection, watching my jaw tighten with something that felt almost like determination.
I had spent four years putting my body through hell for a baby. I had endured needles and hormones and procedures that made me feel like a science experiment. I had gained thirty pounds and lost three pregnancies and watched my self-esteem crumble into dust.
And then I had spent eight months watching another woman take my place. In my home. In my marriage. In the public narrative of my own fucking family.
I was done.
I was done being the sad, broken wife who couldn't carry her own child. I was done being the invisible woman in the corner of photographs. I was done letting my body be a source of shame instead of strength.
If my marriage was over, then I would rebuild myself from the ashes.
And if it wasn't over, if there was some universe where Tristen and I found our way back to each other, then I would come to that reunion as a whole person.
Not a shell. Not a ghost. Not the desperate, insecure woman who had let herself be erased because she was too afraid to take up space.
I took a shower that lasted forty-five minutes.
I scrubbed my skin until it was pink and tingling, washing away days of neglect and months of accumulated grief.
I washed my hair twice and conditioned it three times, working through the tangles with my fingers until it fell smooth and clean down my back.
When I stepped out of the shower, I felt something shift inside my chest. Not hope, exactly. It was too soon for hope. But maybe the beginning of possibility. The faintest crack of light in the darkness I'd been living in.
I drove to the grocery store and filled my cart with vegetables and lean proteins and all the things I'd stopped eating when the hormones made me crave nothing but carbs and sugar.
I bought running shoes and yoga pants and a journal with a leather cover that felt smooth and expensive under my fingertips.
The cashier, a teenage girl with purple hair and a bored expression, didn't recognize me.
Didn't know that the woman buying kale and salmon was the same woman whose face had been plastered across gossip sites for the past week.
Didn't know that I was hiding from a life that had imploded so spectacularly the whole internet had watched it happen.
To her, I was just another customer. Just another anonymous person buying groceries on a Thursday afternoon.
The anonymity felt like a gift.
I started running on the sixth day.
It was brutal. My lungs burned after half a mile, and my legs felt like they were filled with concrete instead of muscle.
I made it to the end of the road before I had to stop, doubled over with my hands on my knees, gasping for breath while my heart pounded against my ribs like it was trying to escape.
But I did it. I ran half a mile, and I didn't die, and when I walked back to the house on shaky legs, I felt something I hadn't felt in years.
Pride.
Not the kind that came from external validation. Not the satisfaction of a successful client meeting or a compliment on my appearance. This was different. This was the quiet, internal knowledge that I had pushed my body to do something hard, and my body had responded.
I ran again the next day. And the day after that. Each time, I went a little farther. Each time, the burning in my lungs lasted a little less. Each time, I felt a little more like myself.
The girl who used to read romance novels on the dock. The woman who had built a successful interior design business from nothing. The person who existed before Aubree Wickham, before the miscarriages, before the surrogacy, before Oakleigh fucking Scott.
I was still in there somewhere. Buried under years of grief and hormones and self-loathing, but still breathing. Still fighting.
On the tenth day, I opened the nightstand drawer and looked at my phone.
The screen showed 127 unread messages and 34 missed calls.
I stared at it for a long moment, feeling the familiar pull of obligation and guilt. Tristen was hurting. I knew he was. Despite everything, despite the lies and the secrets and the betrayal, I didn't want him to suffer. I had loved him too long and too deeply to take pleasure in his pain.
But I couldn't be the one to comfort him. Not anymore. Not when his choices had made me feel so worthless that I'd thrown my wedding rings at his chest and fled in the middle of the night.
I turned the phone off again without reading any of the messages.
Collette called on the landline that evening, the old rotary phone in the kitchen that still somehow worked after all these years.
"You sound different," she said.
"I went for a run today. Three miles."
"Holy shit. Who are you and what have you done with my sister?"
"I'm trying something new. It's called giving a shit about myself."
"I like it. Keep going."
I smiled, and for the first time in what felt like forever, it didn't hurt. "How bad is it out there? In the real world?"
Collette hesitated. "Do you really want to know?"
"No. But tell me anyway."
"Oakleigh's been quiet. No new posts, no interviews. Either Tristen finally put a muzzle on her or she's planning something bigger."
"And Tristen?"
"He's been staying out of the public eye. His assistant released a statement saying the family is taking a break from media appearances to focus on the upcoming birth."
The upcoming birth. The baby. My baby.
The reminder hit me like a punch to the throat.
I'd been so focused on my own pain, my own healing, that I'd almost forgotten what was waiting at the end of all this.
A child. A tiny human being who would need parents, regardless of whether those parents were still married or speaking to each other.
"The baby's due in three months," I said quietly.
"I know."
"I'm going to be a mother."
"You are."
"Even if my marriage is over. Even if Tristen and I never fix this. I'm going to be a mother."
"Yes, you are." Collette's voice was gentle. "And you're going to be a great one. No matter what happens with everything else."
I hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen for a long time, watching the last light of sunset paint the lake in shades of gold and pink.
I was going to be a mother.
The thought settled into my bones like a weight I hadn't realized I was missing.
All this time, I'd been so focused on the pregnancy as something happening to me, through Oakleigh, that I'd almost forgotten what it was really about.
Not the surrogacy. Not the drama. Not the lies and the secrets and the public humiliation.
A baby. My baby. A tiny person made from my eggs and Tristen's DNA and all the hope we'd poured into that final frozen embryo.
I pressed my hand against my stomach, flat and empty, and closed my eyes.
Somewhere out there, my child was growing inside another woman's body. And in three months, that child would be born, and I would hold them in my arms for the first time, and nothing else would matter.
Not the weight I'd gained. Not the marriage I might have lost. Not the public perception or the social media comments or any of the bullshit that had consumed my life for the past eight months.
Just me and my baby.
I could survive anything for that. I could rebuild myself from nothing for that.
And that's exactly what I intended to do.