6. Louella
— ? —
Louella
He was sitting on our front steps when the car pulled up.
Camille had insisted on driving me home.
The doctors wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but I’d signed the discharge papers against their advice because the thought of spending another hour in that sterile room was unbearable.
I needed my own bed. My own space. I needed to process what was happening without the constant hum of hospital machinery.
I didn’t expect to find Hector waiting like a ghost in the porch light.
He looked destroyed. That was the only word for it.
His suit was rumpled, tie loosened, hair standing up like he’d been running his hands through it for hours.
When he saw me getting out of the car, he surged to his feet with an expression I couldn’t read, relief, terror, guilt, all of it tangled together.
“Louella. God, Louella, I just found out…”
“Found out what?”
“That it was an ambulance.” He came toward me, hands reaching, and I stepped back without thinking. “I thought… Elizabeth said you were at a party. She said Camille called about some event. I didn’t know until an hour ago that you were in the hospital. My phone was dead in the car and I…”
“You were with her.” Not a question.
“Yes, but not… it’s not what you think.”
“What is it, then? Explain to me what exactly you were doing with Elizabeth Silva while I was unconscious in an emergency room.”
Camille was still standing by the car, watching. I felt her presence like backup, a witness to whatever was about to unfold.
“Can we go inside?” Hector’s voice dropped. “Please. There’s a lot I have to tell you.”
Part of me wanted to refuse. To leave him on those steps and lock the door and never have this conversation at all. But a larger part, the part that had loved him for years, the part that still remembered the vineyard, needed to hear whatever truth he was finally ready to tell.
“Camille, I’m okay. Go home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I didn’t look away from Hector. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She hesitated, then got back in her car. I watched her taillights disappear around the corner before I finally walked past my husband into our house.
Inside, the lights were off. I didn’t turn them on. The darkness felt appropriate for whatever was coming.
“Start talking.”
“Elizabeth’s pregnant.”
The words landed like a physical blow. I reached for the wall to steady myself.
“She came to my office tonight. With a pregnancy test on the clinic’s letterhead, our clinic, the fertility place we used. She says the baby is mine. She says we were together in Boston, at a conference six weeks ago.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t know.” His voice cracked. “I don’t remember. I had one drink and then… nothing. Hours of nothing. I woke up in my hotel room alone, fully dressed, with no memory of anything after that first drink.”
“How convenient.”
“Louella, I’m telling you the truth. I know how it sounds, but I didn’t touch her. I know I didn’t. I can’t explain the missing hours… one drink and then nothing, like something was done to me… and now there’s a photograph and a test result and I can’t prove any of it.”
“Photograph?”
He pulled out his phone, showed me an image. Grainy security footage. Two figures at a bar, bodies angled toward each other, her hand on his arm. It looked damning. It looked like exactly what Elizabeth wanted it to look like.
“This doesn’t prove anything,” I said.
“I know. But she has the test results on clinic letterhead. My family’s clinic. And she told my mother before she told me.”
“She told Genevieve?”
“My mother already has attorneys involved. She texted me that this could be ‘the best thing that’s happened to this family.’ She’s glad, Louella. She’s glad about all of it.”
Of course she was. This was everything Genevieve had wanted, Elizabeth positioned as the mother of a Lauder heir, and me pushed out of the picture entirely.
Whether Elizabeth was actually pregnant, whether Hector had actually touched her, it didn’t matter to Genevieve.
What mattered was the opportunity to finally be rid of the inadequate daughter-in-law who’d failed to produce results.
“Why were you with her tonight?” My voice was steadier than I felt. “If you think she’s framing you, why were you in the car with her while I was in an ambulance?”
“She called me. Said she was bleeding, that the pregnancy was in trouble. I drove her to an after-hours clinic, but when we got there it was closed. She kept saying she needed me to stay with her, that she was scared…”
“And your phone?”
“Dead. I left the charger at the office. By the time I got back and plugged it in, I had six missed calls from Camille and a voicemail saying you’d collapsed.” He took a step toward me. “I came straight here. I swear to you, Louella, I came the moment I knew.”
“An hour ago. You found out an hour ago that your wife was in the hospital.”
“Yes.”
I let that sit between us. An hour. While I was lying in that bed, learning I was pregnant with his child, the vineyard baby, our miracle, he was across the city, attending to Elizabeth’s manufactured emergency.
She’d planned it perfectly. Kept him occupied, kept him offline, made sure he couldn’t reach me until the damage was done.
And he’d let her.
That was the part I couldn’t get past. Even if he was being framed, even if every word of his story was true, the fact remained: Elizabeth had been able to manipulate him because he’d already given her that power.
Months of late nights. Months of emails at 2 a.m. Months of letting her position herself at his side while his wife watched from across the room.
He’d created the conditions for his own destruction.
I looked at him standing there in his ruined suit, and I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to. But wanting wasn’t the same as being able to.
“I’m not sure what to believe anymore,” I said, and my voice cracked on it.
“That’s the worst part. I know you. I know you’re not the kind of man who does what she’s saying you did.
But lately I don’t know you at all. You’ve been a stranger in your own house for months, and now you’re standing here asking me to trust a version of you I haven’t seen in longer than I can remember. ”
“Louella…” His voice broke. “I don’t have proof. I don’t have anything except the fact that I know I didn’t touch her. I know how little that’s worth right now.”
“It’s worth something.” I made myself stop there, before I gave him more than that.
Before I talked myself into a forgiveness I hadn’t decided on.
“But even if I believe that part, it doesn’t change the only thing I actually know.
Which is that I’ve been alone. Not just tonight.
For months. And you didn’t notice until someone else made you look. ”
“What do you mean?”
“You weren’t there, Hector. Tonight, when I needed you, you were with another woman. It doesn’t matter why. It doesn’t matter that she tricked you. The result is the same: I woke up alone in a hospital bed, and you weren’t there.”
“I didn’t know…”
“You should have been trying to find out where I was.” The words came out serrated.
“The second that phone came back on and you saw the missed calls, you should have driven straight to me. You never should have let your phone die in a car outside a clinic with her while I was somewhere you couldn’t be reached.
You should have been at Camille’s opening with me instead of sitting in your office waiting for Elizabeth to summon you. ”
“I know.” He sounded broken. “I know I should have been there.”
“But you weren’t. You haven’t been for months. Maybe longer. And I can’t…” My voice caught, and I forced it steady. “I can’t keep waiting for you to choose me, Hector. I can’t keep being the thing you get around to when everyone else is done with you.”
“I’ll fix this. The Elizabeth situation, my mother…”
“It’s not about Elizabeth.” I was crying now, tears I hadn’t given myself permission to release.
“It’s about you. It’s about the fact that I’ve been drowning for months and you never noticed.
It’s about the fertility treatments I stopped because I couldn’t bear them anymore and you didn’t even ask why.
It’s about falling asleep alone every night while you work late, and waking up alone every morning because you’ve already left. ”
“I’m sorry.” He reached for me again. “I’m so sorry. I’ll do better. I’ll fire Elizabeth, cut my mother off, whatever you need…”
“I need you to go.”
He stopped. “What?”
“I need you to leave. Tonight. I can’t think with you here, and I need to think.”
“Louella, please. We can work this out…”
“You should have been trying to find out where I was.” I repeated it like a verdict, because that’s what it was. The final piece of evidence in the case I’d been building for months. “Instead, you were with her. And all the apologies in the world don’t change that fact.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t care. Your mother’s house. A hotel. Elizabeth’s apartment, you have the address, don’t you?” The cruelty felt good. I hated how good it felt. “Just not here. Not tonight.”
He stood there for a long moment, and I watched the fight drain out of him. Watched him accept that there was nothing he could say, nothing he could do, that would undo the damage of his absence.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
“I know.” It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t anything at all. “But sometimes that’s not enough.”
He left.
I listened to his car start, the engine fading down the street, and then I was alone in the dark house with only the sound of my own breathing for company.
***
My hand moved to my stomach. The baby I hadn’t told him about. The secret I’d kept because he hadn’t earned the right to know. The one piece of us I still controlled.
I sank down against the wall, my legs giving out, and sat there on the cold floor while the tears came harder.
Cried for the marriage I thought we had.
For the husband I thought I’d married. For the baby growing inside me who might never know their father, because their father had never figured out how to be present for the family he already had.
When the tears finally stopped, I pulled out my phone.
Dana’s number was still in my contacts. My sister had been telling me for months to call her, ever since things with Hector first started feeling wrong. A contingency plan. A just-in-case.
She answered on the second ring.
“Dana, it’s me. I need a divorce lawyer.” I pressed my hand harder against my stomach, against the secret I would keep until I chose otherwise, the one thing they couldn’t take from me. “Tonight.”