My Husband Doesn't Believe Our Baby is His (Her Marriage in Crisis #106)

1. Eloise

— ? —

Eloise

At some point, my life became a loop, and I stopped trying to find the exit.

Oliver’s tie is crooked again.

He’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror with his collar up, pulling at the knot the way he always does, too fast, too impatient, and I can see from across the room that the left side is already shorter than the right.

In about ten seconds he’ll yank it loose and start over, and the second attempt will be worse.

I’m already crossing the room before he can ruin it further, my fingers finding the silk and pulling the knot free. He drops his hands to his sides and lets me take over, chin lifting slightly to give me room, because this is what we do.

Every morning, every trip, every departure. I fix the tie, he lets me.

Neither of us acknowledges that it’s the most intimate part of our day.

“I’ll try to wrap everything in a week,” he says. “Push some of the backend meetings forward.”

“Sure.” I fold the wide end over the narrow and loop it through.

My father’s method, the one he taught me when I was twelve, standing me on a kitchen chair so I could reach his collar. I got good at it. One of those useless skills you carry into a life that has no use for them, until it does.

“I mean it,” Oliver says. “A week. I’ll move things around.”

My knuckles brush his collar as I slide the knot up, and the air around him changes. His jaw tightens. His breathing shifts, or maybe I imagine it, because when I glance up his eyes are already on me and the look in them pins me still.

Not cold, not warm… Just there. Present in a way Oliver rarely is, his gaze settled on my face with an intensity that makes my fingers slow against the silk.

I hold the look. My pulse counts the seconds.

“Your dentist appointment,” I say, and my voice comes out quieter than I planned. “I rescheduled it. The one you forgot twice. Tuesday after you’re back.”

“Alright.”

“And the Dorian dinner. I moved the seating around so Kessler isn’t next to your father again.”

“Mhm.” His eyes haven’t left mine. I smooth his collar down, my hands resting there a beat too long, the warmth of him through the shirt pressing into my palms. Aftershave and cedar with a warmth underneath that’s just him, and I pull my hands away before the wanting becomes obvious.

I take a step back to check my work. The knot sits clean, centered, exactly the way he never manages on his own.

“Perfect,” he says, glancing at the mirror behind me.

He could be talking about the tie. No, actually, he’s definitely talking about the tie.

I follow him out of the bathroom and down the hall. The distance between us returns to its normal width, the careful gap that neither of us closes.

In the kitchen, his carry-on is already by the door. I pour his coffee, cream with no sugar, and set it next to his elbow at the counter where he’s pulling up emails on his phone. He lifts the mug without looking, takes a sip, sets it back down.

“Your gray suit’s at the cleaners,” I say. “Ticket’s on the fridge.”

“Got it.”

“Landscapers are coming Thursday. I’ll handle it.”

He nods without looking up, his thumb scrolling through emails, and the silence fills in around us the way it always does. Empty, the particular kind of quiet that happens when two people share a house, a name, and a bed but not a single honest sentence before nine in the morning.

This is our morning.

This is every morning.

I manage the house, the calendar, the social obligations, the small invisible machinery that keeps his life running while he runs everything else. The coffee appears, the tie gets tied, the dinners get arranged.

Oliver moves through a life that’s been made smooth for him, and it never occurs to him to wonder who’s doing the smoothing.

His phone buzzes. He reads the screen, pushes off the counter, and grabs his bag in one motion. “Car’s here.”

I walk him to the door. He stops in the foyer, bag on his shoulder, and turns to me.

I’m standing there in his navy shirt, the one I took from the bathroom floor this morning because it still carries the scent of him.

Cedar, dry cleaning, the last traces of his skin pressed into the cotton.

He wears the other ones. This one is mine now, though he’s never noticed.

Then his gaze finds mine again, and it’s that same look from the bedroom.

Steady, unwavering. Intense enough that my breath stalls in my chest and I’m not sure what to do with my hands.

“You have my card,” he says, and his voice is low, measured, as if he’s choosing the words carefully. “If anything comes up. Anything at all.”

“I know.”

“I mean it, Eloise.” My full name. He only uses it when he’s being firm. “Whatever you need. Whatever you want.”

He probably means it the way it sounds. Generous and open, a husband making sure his wife is taken care of while he’s gone.

But the words settle wrong inside me, curling into a shape he didn’t intend, and what I hear underneath them is: spend what you want, buy what you need, fill your days however you have to.

As if that’s the whole of me. A woman with a card and an empty house and nothing to do with either that matters.

The wife who lunches, who shops, who arranges flowers on tables no one sits at, who swipes his name across receipts because it’s the only part of him she gets to carry.

The thought is ugly and I push it down before it can reach my face.

I just nod because speaking feels dangerous right now, with him looking at me the way he’s looking at me, close enough that I can see the flecks in his eyes, the tension in his jaw, and the way his hand flexes once at his side before he lifts it.

He leans in, and his lips press to my forehead.

Not my mouth. My forehead.

The way you’d kiss a child, or a friend. Or someone you care about but haven’t figured out how to reach. It’s barely there, over before it starts, and the tenderness of it is worse than nothing because it tells me he’s capable of softness and this is all of it I get.

I close my eyes and hold still. I let myself have the two seconds it lasts, memorizing the pressure of his mouth against my skin, and when I open my eyes, he’s already pulling back, already reaching for the door, his mind three steps ahead of his body.

“I’ll call when I land,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Be back before you know it.”

The door opens and the door closes that way. Through the sidelight window, I watch him cross to the car, and just before he gets in he glances back at the house. At the window.

At me, maybe, if he can see through the glass.

Then he’s in the car, and the car is pulling away while I’m standing in the foyer with the ghost of a forehead kiss fading against my skin, thinking that a wife shouldn’t have to savor a gesture that small.

But I savor it anyway.

I press my fingers to the spot and hold them there, and I let myself want, just for a moment, before I fold it up and put it away with everything else.

The house settles around me.

I give myself exactly thirty seconds to stand there, and then I move because standing still in this foyer has never once made him come back.

The kitchen first. His coffee sits unfinished on the counter, still warm. I pour it down the sink and rinse the mug, placing it back on the shelf where it belongs as the counter gets wiped down and the cream goes back in the fridge.

Small, automatic motions, my hands working through the routine while the rest of me stays somewhere near the front door.

I don’t change out of his shirt even when I should.

It’s nearly seven and the day has things in it, or at least it’s supposed to, but the cotton still holds the trace of last night, the warmth of him beside me in bed, his arm across my waist before the alarm pulled him away. I tug the hem lower over my thighs and keep moving.

The hallway to the bedroom takes me past the wedding photo. It hangs centered on the wall, large, professionally lit, impossible to ignore.

Oliver in a tailored black suit, me in a dress I didn’t choose, both of us standing close enough to look like a couple but not quite touching.

My smile is real in it. That’s the part that gets me every time I pass it.

I was twenty-three, two months past burying my father, signing away my family’s company in exchange for the capital and connections that would keep it alive, and somehow, standing next to a man I barely knew in a ceremony that felt more like a closing than a wedding, I managed a smile that looks genuine.

Maybe it was.

Maybe I looked at Oliver Ellington and decided that if I had to marry a stranger to save what my parents built, at least the stranger had kind eyes.

My fingers brush the frame and the hallway falls away.

The hotel suite is too large for two people who don’t know each other.

I’ve pressed myself against the window in a robe the hotel provided, still in my makeup, still in my earrings, watching the city below because looking at the room means looking at the bed and I’m not ready for that conversation yet.

Oliver is in the doorway. Jacket off, tie loosened, hands in his pockets. He hasn’t moved past the threshold.

“Eloise.”

I turn. He’s watching me with that composed, unreadable expression I’ll come to know as his default, but his jaw is tight and his shoulders are too straight, and I realize, perhaps for the first time, that he’s nervous too.

“I want to be direct with you,” he says. “I think we owe each other that much.”

“Okay.”

“This arrangement exists because our families needed it to. I understand that. You understand that.” He pauses, choosing his words the way I’ll learn he always does, with precision.

“But I don’t intend for you to regret it.

You have my word on that. Whatever this is, whatever it becomes, I will make sure it works.

That’s not a negotiation. That’s a commitment. ”

He says it the way he’d say it in a boardroom. Measured, certain, final. No warmth in it, no tenderness, just the clean architecture of a man who means exactly what he says and says exactly what he means.