9. Christine
— ? —
Christine
My mother’s apartment smells like lavender and pot roast and the particular kind of love that doesn’t ask questions.
It’s small, laughably small after years in the penthouse.
The living room and kitchen blur together, separated only by a counter covered in ceramic roosters my grandmother collected.
The couch is the same one I grew up with, reupholstered twice, the cushions permanently molded to the shape of a thousand movie nights and sick days and teenage crying sessions.
I’m crying now.
Not the dignified tears I allowed myself in the hospital. Not the controlled grief I displayed when I told Benedict to leave. These are the ugly tears - the ones that come with snot and hiccups and sounds that don’t belong in a human throat.
My mother holds me through all of it.
She doesn’t say I told you so, even though she did. She doesn’t say you should have listened, even though I should have. She just wraps her arms around me like I’m five years old again, like the monsters are under the bed instead of on magazine covers, and she lets me fall apart.
“I thought-” The words come out in gasps, broken by sobs. “I thought we were going to make it. I thought if I just tried harder, loved him better-”
“Shh.” Mom’s hand strokes my hair, the same rhythmic motion she used when I had nightmares. “You loved him plenty. You loved him more than enough.”
“Then why wasn’t it enough?”
She doesn’t answer. We both know there’s no good answer.
Isabella sleeps in a bassinet by the window - the same bassinet I slept in, pulled from the attic and cleaned with care I didn’t have the energy to give.
My daughter is oblivious to the wreckage around her.
She just sleeps, eats, and cries, her needs so simple compared to the catastrophe of her parents’ marriage.
I envy her that simplicity.
The first headline hits the afternoon after I arrive.
MORGAN WIFE FILES FOR DIVORCE DAYS AFTER GIVING BIRTH
Mom tries to hide it from me, turning off the television when I enter the room, casually closing browser tabs when I walk past her laptop. But news travels faster than maternal protection. My phone - the one I’ve stopped answering - fills with notifications I can’t avoid.
SOURCES SAY: BLONDE VP AT CENTER OF SPLIT
BILLIONAIRE’S BABY MAMA MOVES TO QUEENS
INSIDE THE MORGAN MARRIAGE: WHAT WENT WRONG?
There are photos. Of me leaving the hospital, looking haggard and hollow. Of the penthouse, empty and abandoned. Of Benedict outside our building, head bowed, looking like a man attending his own funeral.
Good, I think. Let him mourn.
Then I hate myself for the cruelty of that thought.
Then I remember twelve hours of labor alone and decide maybe I’m entitled to a little cruelty.
The phone calls start on the second day.
Reporters, mostly. How did I get this number? someone from TMZ. We’d love to tell your side of the story. A woman from People, her voice dripping false sympathy. Sources say you were blindsided by the affair. Would you like to comment?
I block them all.
Lawyers call next. His people, my people, people I’ve never heard of claiming to represent my interests.
They use words like assets and custody and prenuptial provisions, and I let my voicemail fill up because I can’t think about any of it.
I can’t think about dividing a life I thought would last forever.
I block those numbers too.
But there’s one number I can’t seem to block.
Benedict calls forty-seven times in five days.
I watch the notifications pile up, each one a small act of violence against my resolve. Missed call from Benedict. Missed call from Benedict. Missed call from Benedict. Voicemail. Voicemail. Voicemail.
I don’t listen to them. I can’t. His voice would undo me - the low rumble of it, the way it used to make me feel safe, the way it probably still would if I let it.
I can’t let it.
The forty-eighth call comes at eleven at night.
I’m sitting in the kitchen, Isabella finally asleep after three hours of fussing, a cup of cold tea forgotten in front of me.
Mom went to bed hours ago, exhausted from picking up the pieces of my shattered life, and the apartment is so quiet I can hear the upstairs neighbor’s television through the ceiling.
The phone lights up. His name. His face - a photo from our honeymoon, both of us laughing at something I can’t remember, so young and stupid and sure.
My finger hovers over decline.
But something in me - the part that still remembers dancing at 3 a.m., that still aches when I smell his cologne on the wind, that still stupidly, desperately loves him despite everything - that part makes me answer.
“Christine.” His voice is wrecked. Broken in a way I’ve never heard. “Please. Just let me explain-”
“Explain what?” The words come out cold.
Controlled. The ice-queen voice I’ve been practicing in the mirror, the one that doesn’t betray how much this is costing me.
“That you chose work over me for years? That you missed the birth of your child because you were too important to keep your phone charged?”
“I never-”
“That while I was hemorrhaging, you were taking photos with a woman who’s been trying to replace me since the day we met?”
Silence.
Heavy. Damning.
I should hang up. I should end this call and block his number permanently and never let his voice inside my head again.
Instead, I keep talking. Because the anger needs somewhere to go, and he’s the only target that makes sense.
“I’m done explaining for you, Benedict. I’m done making excuses. Do you know how many times I told myself it was fine? That you were under pressure, that the company needed you, that I just had to be patient and eventually you’d come back to me?”
“Christine-”
“I’m done being invisible in my own marriage.”
The words land like a bomb. I can hear him breathing on the other end - ragged, uneven breaths that might be crying or might be the sound of a man finally hearing what he’s done.
“I’ll do anything.” His voice cracks. “Anything. Name it. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“You can do anything for your company. For your investors. For everyone but me.” I’m crying now, silent tears streaming down my face in the dark kitchen. “I don’t want your anything anymore.”
I hang up before he can respond.
The phone immediately lights up again. His name. His face.
I turn it off and sit in the darkness until my mother finds me at dawn, still crying, still frozen, still completely unsure how to survive this. When I switch it on again, the first thing I do is block his number.
***
The doorbell rings the following afternoon.
I’m not expecting anyone. I’m never expecting anyone anymore - I’ve become a hermit, a ghost, a woman who exists only in the space between feedings and diaper changes.
My pajamas are the same ones I’ve worn since Tuesday.
My hair is a disaster. My eyes are so swollen from crying that I look like I’ve been stung by bees.
Isabella is fussing in my arms, making that particular sound that means she’s working up to a full-blown wail. I bounce her gently as I shuffle toward the door, too exhausted to care who’s on the other side.
I peer through the peephole.
My heart stops.
Benedict.
He looks worse than I do. Unshaven, hollow-eyed, wearing clothes that are wrinkled and mismatched in a way that suggests he hasn’t slept or possibly changed since I last saw him.
There are shadows under his eyes that look like bruises.
His hand is raised to knock again, shaking slightly, and I realize with a jolt that Benedict Morgan - the man who commands boardrooms and intimidates executives and has never shown weakness to anyone - is trembling on my mother’s doorstep.
I wrench open the door.
“No.”
“Christine-”
“No.” I step back, blocking the entrance with my body even though part of me wants to let him in, wants to fall into his arms and pretend none of this ever happened. “You don’t get to be here. You don’t get to show up at my mother’s house like-”
“I had to see you.” His voice cracks on the words. “I had to see her. Please. I’ve been calling-”
“I blocked your number.”
“I know. I-” He runs a hand through his hair, and his whole body seems to sway with the motion. “I’ve been outside for three hours. Trying to work up the courage to ring the bell. I didn’t know if you’d-”
His eyes drop to the bundle in my arms, and everything about him changes. His face, his posture, the desperate energy thrumming through him - all of it goes still and soft and something like holy.
“Is she… can I…”
Isabella, with impeccable timing, begins to wail.
My arms tighten around her instinctively. “You should go.”
“Christine, please.” He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s looking at our daughter - at the tiny, furious, red-faced creature screaming in my arms. “I just want to hold her. I just want to - I wasn’t there when she needed me. When you needed me.”
His voice breaks completely.
I’ve seen Benedict Morgan in crisis. I’ve seen him lose billion-dollar deals and face hostile boardrooms and bury his father. I have never - not once - seen him like this. Broken. Desperate. Begging on a doorstep for time with his own child.
Every instinct screams at me to close the door. To protect myself. To protect Isabella from the man who’s already failed us both.
But the look on his face…
“A few minutes,” I hear myself say. “And then you leave.”
He steps inside like he’s entering a church.
The apartment is small - I watch him process that, the way his eyes sweep over the crocheted blankets and family photos and the kitchen that’s smaller than our old closet.
But he doesn’t comment. Doesn’t compare.
Just moves past it all like it doesn’t exist, because it doesn’t - not to him, not right now.
He only sees Isabella.
“Can I…” His throat works. “Can I hold her?”