My Husband's Deception (The Betrayal Upgrade Series #17)

Chapter 1

The clinic still has the fish tank. Same three plastic plants it had six years ago, back when I believed a laminated brochure could change my life.

At forty-four, I know better than to trust anything with a smiling baby on the cover, but I sit under it anyway, marking a comma in Darren's fourth book while he signs a stranger's copy across the room.

Editing a man's sincerity in a waiting room is its own kind of discipline.

You learn to do it without moving your lips.

Fatherhood begins with faith before it begins with facts.

Darren has never written a sentence that clean in his life, not once, not in thirteen years of drafts I've quietly fixed before anyone else read them.

He's said versions of it into cameras, though, and I've spent that whole time turning his pauses into paragraphs.

Somewhere there's a spreadsheet of his best ad-libs, tagged by tour stop, so nobody repeats a line two nights running.

I built the spreadsheet. Nobody knows the spreadsheet exists.

"Make it out to Marsha," the woman across the room says. Pink hospital bracelet, the kind you get after a procedure, not before one. "My husband listens every morning. Says you give him hope."

Darren looks up with the warm, wounded eyes that sold three books and more ball caps than I've bothered counting. "Tell him to keep showing up. That's the whole job."

Marsha presses her fingers to her mouth like she's been handed a miracle.

The receptionist takes a photo on Darren's phone.

He knows which side of his face the window light likes.

He knew it before anyone unpacked a ring light for this room, the same way he knows which knee to squeeze on camera and which one is just for me.

When the nurse calls "Mr. and Mrs. Ostrander," he stands first and offers me his hand like we're walking onto a stage instead of into an exam room with two chairs and a box of tissues.

Dr. Reyburn's office has the chairs angled toward her desk, and the tissues sit in a spot so deliberate it reads less like comfort than liability. Darren takes the chair by the window. Checks his phone before he sits, thumb already moving.

"I know this has been a long road," she says, opening a folder she's already read twice before we walked in. That's her job. Mine is to know what she's about to say before she finishes saying it, which used to feel like competence and now feels like something closer to dread.

Six years since we started trying. The show always called it the five-year journey, rounding the number down to something that fit on a subtitle, and I never corrected it, because I was the one who wrote the subtitles.

Three rounds that were real: real retrievals, real embryos, two good ones we kept frozen for later because the doctor said no sense wasting them.

Two more rounds after that, on what was left in the tank.

Five total. Five losses I filed under my own failure, because that was the only place in the story where there was room for them.

"We're ready for round six," Darren says. His hand finds my knee under the desk. Thumb moves once, right where a camera would catch it if there were one here, which there isn't, which is the whole point of him doing it anyway. "Whatever it takes."

I watch Dr. Reyburn's face soften around him the way every face does. She believes him. That's the thing about Darren. He doesn't lie badly. He makes room for other people to help him lie, and they climb in like it's an honor.

"The two embryos from round three were the last of what we had banked," she says, glancing at her screen.

"So before we move forward, we need a fresh sample from Darren, and given his andrology results from this week, that's going to be a different conversation than the one I expected to have today. "

The office does not tilt. I hate it for that. A good room ought to have the decency to react when a woman's marriage turns out to have a footnote she's never been shown.

Darren's thumb stops.

His phone buzzes on the desk, face down, and he doesn't even glance at it before he's on his feet.

"That's the morning call for the tour. I thought Yvette pushed that.

" A smile arranged carefully around something underneath it.

"Can you give Gwen the details? She runs our calendar better than I do. "

He kisses my temple before I can decide whether to turn my face away. "Babe. We'll talk tonight."

Then he's gone, his cologne still sitting in the chair after he isn't.

Dr. Reyburn looks at the door, then back at me. "Would you like me to wait for him to come back?"

No. I want to know if she'll say it again with nobody in the room to manage her face for her.

"He's got opening night in under a month." My voice arrives right on time, crisp as a tracked-change note. "Please. Keep going."

She opens the chart wider. "His sample this week came back with no motile sperm.

We ran it twice, standard protocol. Given that, I pulled his urology records under the release you both signed at intake, and an operative note came back dated two years ago.

It's part of the shared record now, since it affects our treatment planning going forward. "

"What's in his file."

Her eyes lift to mine. "The vasectomy."

The word sits in the room the way a dropped glass sits on tile for exactly one second before it becomes a problem you have to clean up.

"When."

She turns a page. "Two years ago next month." Her finger stops on a line. "The date lines up with right after your round-three retrieval. I'm sorry. I assumed the two of you had discussed this."

Round three. The one where we got two good embryos, and Darren cried on stage that same week about faith rewarding patience, and I stood backstage holding a paper cup of ginger ale because my hormones still hadn't leveled out from the retrieval two days earlier.

Two years ago. The week Episode 200 went up, Waiting for Baby, the one that broke every download record he'd ever had, the one where he choked up on cue at the eleven-minute mark and the comments filled overnight with women naming their own losses to a stranger who'd never had one of his own to name.

We had the frozen embryos by then. He didn't need anything else, ever again, and he knew it before I did.

He voted down donor eggs in the car after round four failed, let's not complicate what's already working, we just need patience, and I heard patience and thought he meant faith.

He meant inventory. He was managing a supply chain and calling it a marriage.

"For the next appointment," I say, and my voice does not break, because I've spent thirteen years training it not to, "can you send me a complete copy of our file? I want to make sure the tour schedule doesn't conflict with anything."

She reaches for a release form without hesitating, already pulling up the print screen.

Why would she hesitate. I'm the wife who keeps the calendar.

The wife who knows every dosage, every invoice, every prayer request that comes into a post-office box with his face on the flyer and his handwriting nowhere near it.

I sign where she points. My signature is steady. I notice that the way you notice weather.

In the parking garage I sit behind the wheel with the release folded into my tote and open my phone instead of crying.

My calendar gives me two years in clean, obedient rows.

Round three. The two frozen embryos, tagged with the little snowflake icon the clinic app uses, which I have never found funny until right now.

Episode 200, the day it crossed a million plays, still starred in blue because I'd been proud of him for it.

Round four. Round five. Every failed transfer I sat through like it still mattered whether it worked, because nobody had told me it couldn't.

I open a new calendar. I don't put anything in it yet. Some things you build the shelf for before you know what's going on it. I've spent my whole career building the shelf before the client hands me the manuscript. It's the only part of this that still feels like a skill I chose.

My phone buzzes. Renata: lunch thursday? I need to complain about a resident and you need to tell me why you sound like a hostage in your last three texts. I don't answer yet. I want to know what I actually am before I describe it to the one person who'll believe me without proof.

At home that night, Darren stands at the kitchen island in his socks, rehearsing the opening-night segment into the black screen of his tablet like it's a mirror that only tells him the truth he wants.

The island sits where a farmhouse table used to be, the one I wrote his first book on at three in the morning, before success replaced wood with quartz and made everything easier to wipe clean.

"When we started this journey," he says, then stops. "No. Too broad."

He looks up, genuinely stuck, the way he never is on stage. "What did I say in Tulsa?"

I set my tote on the chair. The release form makes a small, flat square against the leather that only I can feel.

"You said, We learned that faith isn't getting the answer on our schedule." I give him the catch he needs anyway, because thirteen years of doing a job well doesn't stop just because you've learned what the job actually is. "Then the pause. Look down."

His shoulders loosen. "That's why I need you." He says it the way another man might say I love you, and for thirteen years I let the two sound the same.

I smile at my husband while he rehearses grief he bought, on purpose, two years ago, at wholesale, and I keep the word behind my teeth until it cuts.