Neglected and Pregnant by Her Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #111)

1. Beatrice

— ? —

Beatrice

Before

The fluorescent lights hum their familiar lullaby overhead, casting everything in that particular shade of pale that makes even healthy people look slightly ill.

My sneakers squeak against the linoleum as I move between beds, the sound as constant as the machines keeping people alive in the rooms I pass.

Someone’s monitor beeps in steady rhythm down the hall.

A child cries somewhere in triage. The vending machine at the end of the corridor shudders through its eternal death rattle.

I’m finishing my notes on a seven-year-old with a broken arm, a sweet kid named Marcus who cried exactly once when I set the bone and then spent the rest of the time asking if his cast could be green because green is the color of dinosaurs.

His mother watched me with that particular expression parents get when they’re holding themselves together by sheer force of will, and I found myself talking more than necessary, explaining every step, because sometimes that’s what people need.

Not silence. Not efficiency. Just someone who sees them.

The chart is almost done. Three more lines and I can hand Marcus off to the ortho resident for his cast, check on the teenager in bay four who came in with a suspected concussion, and maybe steal ten minutes in the break room to eat the granola bar I’ve been carrying in my pocket for the last three hours.

The ER doors swing open. I don’t look up. Doors swing open every few minutes here. It’s the nature of the place.

But then a voice cuts through the noise, a voice I haven’t heard in four years, and my pen stops moving.

“I need someone to tell me where to find Dr. Beatrice Calloway. Or Sinclair now, I guess. Unless she finally came to her senses.”

I turn.

Ralphie Mendez stands in the middle of my emergency room like he owns it.

Travel-rumpled and grinning, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder.

Same wild curls that never quite behave.

Same ridiculous dimples that got him out of trouble more times than I can count.

Same energy that used to drag me into on-call room karaoke sessions and 3 AM coffee runs and the kind of laughter that made residency survivable.

“Oh my God.” I’m already moving, abandoning my chart on the counter. “Oh my God, Ralphie.”

He catches me in a hug that lifts me off my feet, spinning me once before setting me down. I’m laughing and possibly crying and definitely making a scene in the middle of my workplace, but I don’t care. I don’t care at all.

“Surprise, Busy Bea.”

“What are you doing here?” I pull back to look at him, to make sure he’s real. “You’re supposed to be in Seattle for another year. Your fellowship-”

“Finished early.” His grin widens. “They offered me an attending position at Rhode Island Hospital starting this month.”

“Starting this month? Ralphie, that’s-”

“I’m back.” He squeezes my shoulders. “For good.”

For good. The words settle into my chest like something warm and necessary. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed him until this exact moment, until he’s standing in front of me and I can feel the specific shape of the hole his absence left.

“You should have called.” I swat his arm. “I would have picked you up from the airport. I would have made a sign. I would have-”

“Shown up in scrubs with coffee breath and dark circles?” He’s teasing, but his eyes are doing that thing they do, reading me the way he reads patients. “I wanted to surprise you. Besides, I took the red-eye. Nobody should have to deal with airport pickup at this hour.”

“I deal with this hour every night.”

“Which is why you deserve better than airport runs.” He hooks his arm through mine. “Now. Is there somewhere in this hospital that sells something resembling food? I’m starving and I have four years of gossip to catch up on.”

I should finish my chart. I should check on the concussion kid. I should do approximately seventeen things that don’t involve abandoning my post to catch up with an old friend.

I don’t do any of them.

“Cafeteria’s this way,” I say. “The coffee is terrible and the muffins are stale, but the company’s about to improve dramatically.”

The cafeteria at this hour is a ghost town. A few exhausted residents huddle over tablets in the corner. A security guard nods off over a cup of coffee that’s gone cold. The vending machines cast their pale glow over empty tables.

We split a muffin that’s approximately seventy percent preservatives and talk over each other like no time has passed at all.

“So the attending position,” I say. “That’s huge. That’s everything you wanted.”

“It’s a start.” Ralphie picks a blueberry out of the muffin, examines it skeptically, eats it anyway. “The fellowship was good. Seattle was good. But it wasn’t home.”

“Rhode Island is home now? The guy who spent all of residency complaining about the winters?”

“The winters are still garbage.” He grins. “But the people are worth freezing for.”

Something in my chest aches at that. Worth freezing for. When was the last time I felt like anyone thought I was worth anything?

“Tell me everything,” I say. “The fellowship, the cases, the terrible hospital coffee. I want all of it.”

So he does. He tells me about the pediatric neurology cases that kept him up at night, the attending who made him cry twice and then wrote him a glowing recommendation, the apartment with the view of the Space Needle that he could only see if he stood on his toilet and craned his neck at exactly the right angle.

He tells me about the patient who sent him a drawing every week for six months, and the one he couldn’t save, and the way Seattle rain sounds different from Rhode Island rain.

And I listen. Really listen, the way I haven’t listened to anyone in months, because Kenneth’s calls are always rushed and Josephine’s conversations are always interrogations and somewhere along the way I forgot what it felt like to just be with someone who wanted nothing from me except my company.

“You look tired,” Ralphie says eventually, and it’s not an insult, just an observation from someone who’s seen me through worse.

Through overnight shifts that never ended.

Through attending reviews that made me cry in supply closets.

Through the particular exhaustion of learning how to save lives while feeling like I was barely surviving my own.

“I am tired.” I wrap my hands around my coffee cup, absorbing its warmth. “But the good kind. Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

I shrug. Don’t know how to explain the creeping loneliness of a marriage that happens in five-minute phone calls and empty dinner tables.

Kenneth is busy. I know that. I married a man who runs an empire, who has responsibilities I can barely comprehend, whose calendar is managed by three different assistants across multiple time zones.

But knowing why I’m alone doesn’t make me less alone.

“Work is good,” I say instead. “Busy, but good. We got a new attending last month who actually knows what she’s doing, which is a miracle. And I’ve been taking extra shifts because-”

“Because you’d rather be here than home?”

The question lands somewhere uncomfortable. I take a long sip of terrible coffee to avoid answering.

“Bea.”

“It’s fine.” I set down my cup. “Kenneth’s traveling a lot. The company is expanding into Asia and there’s this deal in Hong Kong that’s been taking up all his time. It’s just a busy season.”

“How long has this busy season been going on?”

Too long. Longer than I want to admit. “It’ll calm down eventually. It always does.”

Ralphie doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t push. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about him. He sees everything, understands everything, and knows exactly when to let things lie.

“Tell me about the new attending,” he says, and I could kiss him for changing the subject. “Is she single? Asking for a friend.”

“She’s sixty-three and has been married for forty years.”

“My friend has very specific tastes.”

I laugh, and it feels good, feels real in a way nothing has in months.

We talk about the hospital, about mutual friends from residency, about the patient who came in last week convinced he’d swallowed a golf ball.

We talk about everything and nothing, and for a little while I forget that I’m exhausted and lonely and living a life that doesn’t quite fit anymore.

At 4 AM, when my shift ends and Ralphie’s yawning so wide his jaw cracks, I walk him to the exit. The sky outside is shifting from black to deep blue, the first hints of dawn bleeding in at the edges.

“Where are you staying?” I ask.

“Hotel tonight. Apartment hunting starts tomorrow.” He stretches, his back cracking audibly. “I forgot how much red-eyes destroy the human body.”

“You’re getting old.”

“We’re the same age.”

“And yet you’re the one who can’t handle a cross-country flight anymore.”

He shoves me gently, and I shove him back, and for a moment we’re twenty-four again, exhausted and terrified and surviving on caffeine and each other.

“We’re getting the girls together,” I say. “A proper welcome-back party. Priya, Morgan, Jenna. Everyone.”

“You don’t have to-”

“I want to.” The words come out fierce, more fierce than I intended. “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed having someone who actually listens to me.”

He pulls back. Studies my face with that annoying perceptiveness that made him such a good diagnostician. In another life, maybe he would have been a psychiatrist. He has the eyes for it, the way they see past the surface into the messy truth underneath.

“Bea.” His voice is gentle. “Are you okay? Really?”

I think about my husband in Hong Kong. My empty house. The way I’ve started talking to myself just to hear a voice.

“I’m fine.” I smile, and it’s almost true. “I’m better now that you’re here.”

He hugs me again, fierce and quick, and I breathe in the familiar scent of him, coffee and airplane recycled air and something that smells like home.

“Call me tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll start planning that party.”

“I will.”

I watch him walk to the taxi stand, duffel bag bouncing against his hip. He turns back once, waves, and then he’s gone.

The roads are empty at this hour. I drive with the windows cracked, salt air rushing in to chase away the lingering smell of hospital antiseptic. The sky is lightening moment by moment, pink and gold bleeding into the blue.

I’m already composing the text to Kenneth in my head. You’ll never guess who’s back. My best friend from med school. The one I told you about, Ralphie. Remember? I can’t wait for you to finally meet him.

I’m smiling when I pull into the driveway.

I’m still smiling when I see the lights on inside, even though Kenneth said he’d be in Hong Kong until Friday. My heart lifts. Maybe he came back early. Maybe he wanted to surprise me the way Ralphie surprised me. Maybe-

I’m not smiling when I open the door and find Josephine Sinclair standing in my foyer like she owns the place.

My mother-in-law is dressed immaculately despite the hour, not a silver hair out of place, her cashmere cardigan buttoned precisely over a silk blouse. She looks like she’s about to chair a board meeting, not ambush her daughter-in-law at dawn.

“Josephine.” I stop in the doorway, keys still in hand. “Kenneth didn’t mention you were coming.”

She surveys me with the careful disdain of someone taking inventory. The scrubs, wrinkled from a twelve-hour shift. The messy ponytail, coming loose from its elastic. The dark circles I can feel carved beneath my eyes.

“My son doesn’t tell me everything. Apparently.” Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. It never does. “I let myself in. Remember, I own the keys to this house. I hope you don’t mind.”

I mind very much.

But I step inside anyway, closing the door behind me, the warmth from Ralphie’s return already curdling in my chest.