Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The cruelty found me anyway, even without Lucy's help, at a fundraiser two weeks later where three separate women cornered me with concern dressed up as curiosity, asking with practiced gentleness whether it was hard, after everything with Charles, to know my own infertility might mean Donovan would eventually want children he couldn't have with me.
I smiled through every single question. I excused myself the moment I could without looking like I was running.
The thing about that particular cruelty is how reasonable it sounds out loud, how easily it disguises itself as concern rather than what it actually is, which is a knife dressed up in a casserole dish.
Nobody in that conversation would have called themselves unkind.
They'd have called themselves caring, supportive, simply asking the questions a good friend asks, and I'd spent enough years married, in every way but legally, to a man who specialized in exactly that disguise to recognize it instantly for what it was.
Donovan found me on the side terrace twenty minutes later, where I'd retreated specifically to be alone, and instead of leaving when he saw my face, he came and stood beside me at the railing, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, saying nothing for a long stretch of silence that somehow managed to feel less like pressure and more like company.
"They don't know anything about you," he said eventually. "Not the parts that matter. They just know the parts they can use against you, which isn't the same thing, even if it feels that way at one in the morning at a party you didn't want to attend."
"It's not even about wanting children," I said, surprising myself by saying it out loud at all.
"It's about being reduced to a single failed function every time someone wants to remind me what I'm not.
Charles did that for five years before he ever said the word barren out loud.
He just did it quietly, in small comments, in the way he'd go silent whenever a friend announced a pregnancy, until I started believing the silence was about me specifically rather than about disappointment in general. "
Donovan didn't try to fix that, didn't offer the easy reassurance that the women inside hadn't bothered with either. He simply listened, his eyes steady on my face, and let the silence after I finished speaking sit there without rushing to fill it.
I told him I was fine, the automatic lie women tell when we've decided our actual feelings are an inconvenience to whoever's asking.
He didn't push it, didn't argue, just reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear that had come loose, his fingers brushing my jaw for half a second longer than the gesture strictly required.
The air between us changed in that half second, the way weather changes before you've consciously noticed the temperature dropping.
He was close enough that I could see exactly how dark his eyes had gone, close enough that some part of me, the part that had been keeping that useless private inventory for weeks, leaned in without deciding to.
We almost kissed. I felt the almost in my whole body, felt him start to close the last inch of distance between us, and then some sharp, frightened instinct took over and I stepped back before either of us crossed whatever line we'd both apparently forgotten was a line.
"I should get back inside," I said, which wasn't an answer to anything he'd asked, and he let me go without comment, though I felt his eyes on my back the entire walk to the door.
The worst thing I could imagine, standing on that terrace, wasn't being caught almost kissing my fake husband.
It was the particular terror of needing another man who might one day decide, the way Charles had decided, that I'd stopped being worth keeping.
I'd built an entire wall out of a sold engagement ring and a private bank account specifically so I would never have to feel that particular kind of exposed again, and Donovan Winthrop, without a single calculated move, had just found the one gap in the mortar I hadn't thought to check.