Chapter 4
Grace
The street outside the fertility clinic was blindingly bright, a jarring, aggressive contrast to the dark, roaring void that had just swallowed my life whole.
New York City moved around me in a chaotic blur of yellow cabs, briefcases, and hurried footsteps.
The world hadn’t stopped spinning. The sun hadn’t burned out.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and everything was exactly as it had been an hour ago, except that my entire existence was a carefully constructed lie.
I didn’t hail a cab. I didn’t pull out my phone to call a private town car, the way Adrian preferred me to travel. I just started walking.
My sheath dress, the one Adrian had selected himself from a boutique on Fifth Avenue for its “understated elegance,” suddenly felt like a straitjacket.
I pulled at the high collar, desperate for air that didn’t smell like the artificially freshened air pumped into the clinic’s office.
The summer heat was suffocating, baking the pavement and pressing down on my shoulders, but I couldn’t feel it.
I was freezing cold. The chill radiated outward from the marrow of my bones, a deep, shuddering tremor that I couldn’t suppress.
I want this baby with you.
The recording echoed in my head, Adrian’s low, desperate voice looping over and over again. I squeezed my eyes shut, blindly navigating the crowded sidewalk, nearly colliding with a businessman in a gray suit.
Was the recording real? Or was it edited, as Adrian claimed? Had Celine meticulously chopped up a conversation about a non-disclosure agreement to frame him, or had my husband actually begged our surrogate for sex in her apartment?
As I crossed Madison Avenue, the chaotic noise of the traffic fading into a dull roar, the freezing cold inside me crystallized into an absolute, devastating clarity.
It didn’t matter.
Whether Adrian had slept with Celine or not was irrelevant.
The true, unforgivable betrayal was what had come before the recording.
The truth was Dr. Saylor staring at his mahogany desk, terrified of the man bribing him.
The truth was my husband negotiating a financial transaction to lie to me about my own reproductive system.
Adrian had watched me inject myself with hormones until my skin was a tapestry of black-and-blue bruises. He had watched me cry tears of pure, agonizing grief when the initial retrievals failed. He had sat beside me and held my hand while I wept over an ultrasound of a baby that was never mine.
He hadn’t done it to protect me. He had curated my reality to spare himself the inconvenience of my grief. He had managed me, the exact same way he managed a volatile stock portfolio.
I walked for blocks, unseeing, the soles of my expensive heels aching against the concrete.
Slowly, the pristine storefronts and doormen of the Upper East Side gave way to the grittier, louder energy of Hell’s Kitchen.
I stopped in front of a narrow brick building sandwiched between a bodega and a laundromat.
The fire escape clung to its facade like rusted scaffolding.
I buzzed the apartment labeled 3B.
“Yeah?” a voice crackled through the ancient, static-filled intercom.
“Joss,” I said. My voice cracked, sounding thin and brittle. “It’s Grace.”
A loud, aggressive buzz signaled the heavy door unlocking. I pushed it open and began the climb up the three flights of narrow, scuffed stairs. By the time I reached the third floor, out of breath and shaking, Jocelyn was already standing in her open doorway.
Jocelyn “Joss” Miller was a force of nature in a flour-dusted apron.
Her dark, unruly curly hair was tied back in a messy bandana, and she was wearing a faded Ramones t-shirt over loose, checkered chef’s pants.
We’d met back in culinary school. She was the one who had dragged me out to the upscale dive bar where I had first met Adrian Wright.
Our lives had turned out totally differently, but she was still my bestie.
Joss took one look at my face, and the wooden spoon she was holding dropped from her hand, hitting the hardwood floor with a sharp clatter.
“Grace?” She stepped forward instantly, grabbing my shoulders. Her grip was strong, calloused from years on the line in commercial kitchens. “What happened? Is it the baby? Did something happen at the amnio?”
“It’s not my baby,” I whispered.
The words tasted like ash on my tongue. I had never said them out loud before.
Saying them in this familiar, chaotic apartment made it real.
The fragile, frozen dam holding back my composure finally shattered.
A sob ripped out of my throat, ugly and visceral, tearing through the suffocating tightness in my chest.
Joss didn’t ask another question. She didn’t hesitate. She pulled me into her apartment, kicked the door shut behind us, and guided me directly to her worn, forest-green velvet sofa.
The apartment smelled of roasting garlic, browned butter, and rosemary—the scent of our old life. The life I had before Adrian.
Joss disappeared into the tiny, cramped kitchen and returned a moment later with a heavy crystal tumbler filled with two inches of amber liquid.
“Drink,” she ordered, pressing the cold glass into my shaking hands. “It’s bourbon. Don’t sip it. Just drink it.”
I lifted the glass to my lips and took a large swallow. The alcohol burned a fiery, abrasive path down my throat, the sharp heat finally grounding me in my physical body. I coughed, the tears streaming freely down my face now, ruining the perfect, subtle makeup Adrian preferred.
Joss sat on the battered coffee table facing me, her knees nearly touching mine. She didn’t push. She just waited, a steady, immovable anchor in the storm.
“Talk to me,” she said finally, her voice low and steady. “What do you mean, it’s not your baby? The amnio was today. You were just going in for the genetic screen.”
I nodded slowly, the room spinning slightly from the bourbon and the sheer, overwhelming shock. “The amnio...it showed a genetic trait. Something Adrian carries, but I don’t. The baby has to inherit it from both biological parents.”
Joss frowned, her sharp mind processing the biology, her brow furrowing. “But...it was your embryo. Yours and Adrian’s. The clinic did the extraction.”
“No.” I took another shaky breath, the memory of the consultation room suffocating me all over again. “It wasn’t. My eggs weren’t viable, Joss. The retrieval didn’t work. They were degraded.”
Joss stared at me, the color slowly draining from her face. “But your doctor said—”
“Adrian knew,” I interrupted, the words tumbling out of me in a frantic, broken rush. “Adrian knew they were empty. He paid Dr. Saylor to lie to me. He used an egg donor. Celine. Our surrogate...Joss, she’s actually the biological mother.”
Joss didn’t move. She just stared at me, her dark eyes wide with a horrified, dawning comprehension. “He paid a doctor...to lie to you about your own body?”
“He said he was protecting me,” I choked out, a bitter, hysterical laugh escaping my lips. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “He said I wanted a child so badly, he couldn’t let me lose this too.”
“That sick, controlling bastard,” Joss hissed.
She jumped up from the coffee table so fast she knocked a stack of cookbooks onto the floor. She began to pace the small length of the living room, her hands raking through her curly hair, the flour on her apron flying into the air.
“I knew it,” Joss muttered, her voice vibrating with a protective, furious anger. “I always knew there was something profoundly wrong with how he managed everything, how he managed you, but this? This is monstrous, Grace. It’s medical abuse.”
“It gets worse,” I said, staring blindly at the amber liquid remaining in my glass.
Joss stopped pacing. She looked at me, bracing herself. “How could it possibly get worse?”
“Celine...she claims it wasn’t a clinical donation. She played a recording in the office.” I swallowed hard, the bile rising in my throat. “It sounded like Adrian begging her to—to have sex. Telling her he needed her. Telling her not to tell me.”
Joss’s jaw dropped. “An affair?”
“Adrian swears it’s a lie. He swears the recording is edited from a conversation about the donor contract, about her signing the NDA.
He swore on his life he never touched her.
” I looked up at Joss, feeling hollowed out, a ghost haunting my own life.
“But how can I believe him? He built this entire pregnancy on a lie. How do I know where the lies stop?”
Joss slowly walked back to the coffee table and sat down. She reached out and took the glass from my hands, setting it aside on a coaster, before taking both of my hands in hers. Her grip was warm and solid.
“Grace,” she said, her voice unusually soft, “look at me.”
I met her gaze. She was practically burning with an intense, protective anger that I couldn’t quite muster for myself yet. I was still drowning in the wreckage.
“I’m going to say something, and you’re not going to like it,” Joss said carefully. “But you came here, and I’m your best friend, which means I’m the one who has to tell you the truth when everyone else is lying.”
I braced myself, my shoulders tensing. “Say it.”
“I never liked who you became with him,” she said. The words were blunt, uncompromising, and heavy with years of unspoken resentment.
I flinched, instinctively pulling my hands back, but she held on tight, refusing to let me retreat.
“Hear me out,” she insisted, her grip tightening.
“When we met, you were a hurricane. You were the most talented pastry chef in our cohort. Chef Margaux, the woman who made grown men cry on the line, offered you that apprenticeship in Paris. Paris, Grace. Do you remember how you cried when you got the acceptance letter?”
“I remember,” I whispered. The memory felt like a transmission from a different lifetime, a story about a girl I didn’t even recognize anymore.
“And then you met Adrian Wright,” Joss said, her voice hardening.
“And slowly, piece by piece, you let him talk you out of yourself. He convinced you that a long-distance relationship wouldn’t work.
He convinced you that running a high-stress kitchen wasn’t what you really wanted.
He bought you that beautiful, sterile apartment, and he bought you expensive clothes, and he turned you into this... ”
She gestured with one hand to my dress, my smoothed, elegant hair.
“This curated, self-effacing ornament,” she finished gently, though the words stung like a slap. “You shelved your entire dream to be his perfect, compliant wife.”
Tears pricked my eyes again, hot and defensive. “I loved him, Joss. I wanted to build a life with him.”
“And what kind of life did he build for you?” she countered, her tone sharpening, cutting through my defense.
“A life where he dictates reality. Where he decides what you are allowed to know about your own medical procedures. He doesn’t love you, Grace.
He manages you. You’re an asset in his portfolio. ”
Her words knocked the remaining breath from my lungs. I wanted to argue. I wanted to defend my marriage.
But I couldn’t.
Because she was right. Beneath the shock of today’s catastrophic revelation, the foundation of our marriage had always been fundamentally unequal. Adrian was the architect; I was merely the inhabitant.
You wanted a child so badly, Grace...I couldn’t let you lose this too.
He hadn’t protected me. He had decided what I could handle. He had decided my feelings would work for his timeline.
“He needs the baby,” I said.
My voice was suddenly devoid of emotion. The pieces of Adrian’s frantic, uncharacteristic panic in the clinic were finally, sickeningly clicking together in my mind.
“What?” Joss asked, tilting her head.
“The succession,” I explained, staring at the scarred wood of the coffee table.
“Conrad is stepping down as Chairman of Wright Capital this year. The family trust...it heavily favors stability. An heir. Nolan, Adrian’s brother, has three kids.
Adrian has none. He was going to lose the chairmanship to his brother if we didn’t start a family. ”
Joss’s eyes widened in disgusted comprehension. “He bought a baby to secure his inheritance.”
I pulled my hands away from Joss and stood up.
The trembling in my legs had stopped. The freezing, paralyzing chill in my marrow was rapidly coalescing into something else. Something hard, sharp, and incandescently hot.
Anger.
It was a foreign sensation. For seven years, I had smoothed over conflicts, compromised my desires, and molded myself to fit the contours of Adrian’s demanding life. I had been pliable. I had been sweet. I had been exactly what he needed me to be.
But the woman he had married—the woman who had commanded a chaotic commercial kitchen, who had earned a nod of respect from the terrifying Chef Margaux, who had dreamed of Parisian bakeries and sugar and heat—was still in there. She had just been asleep.
And Adrian Wright had just ripped her awake.
“He begged me not to ruin the gender reveal party on Sunday,” I said, my voice steady, cold, and unfamiliar to my own ears.
Joss snorted, picking up the empty crystal tumbler. “Of course he did. God forbid his family sees the crack in the immaculate facade. So what are you going to do? File for divorce on Monday morning?”
I looked at my reflection in the small, smudged mirror hanging by Joss’s front door. I looked pale, my subtle makeup ruined by tears, the expensive dress wrinkled and stifling. I looked exactly like a victim.
I reached up and pulled the pins out of my chignon, letting my hair fall in a messy, chaotic cascade around my shoulders.
“No,” I said, turning back to Joss. “I’m not going to hide in a lawyer’s office and let him control the narrative of our divorce. I’m going to that party.”
Joss raised an eyebrow, a slow, predatory smile spreading across her face. “Are you going to blow it up?”
“He wants the perfect wife for his perfect family gathering?” I walked over to the kitchen counter, leaning against the worn Formica. “I’ll give him exactly what he paid for. And then I’ll burn it all to the fucking ground.”
“That’s my girl,” Joss said. “I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge. I think we need a toast.”
“To what?” I asked.
“To seeing the last of the version of you that defers to Adrian Wright,” Joss declared, popping the cork on a cheap bottle of prosecco. She poured it into two mismatched mugs and handed one to me.
I took the mug, the anger finally solidifying into a terrifying, unshakeable resolve.
“She’s dead,” I said, and drank.