The Billionaire's Unwanted Pregnant Wife

Chapter 1

The frame was wrong.

I’d picked a silver one from the drawer in the kitchen — the drawer that held the things without a place.

Takeout menus, dead batteries, a lint roller Beckett had used once and abandoned.

The drawer was mine, really. The whole house ran on small systems I’d built so quietly that neither of us noticed they were mine until the day I stopped maintaining them.

But the frame. Silver, simple, the kind you’d find in the dollar section at Target, which I’d walked into on the way back from Dr. Adler’s office because it didn’t seem right to put a sonogram in something expensive.

Beckett would have bought a four-hundred-dollar frame from the shop on Newbury Street, the one that smelled like cedar and polite money.

He would have called it “investing in the moment.” I just wanted something that held a picture.

I slid the ultrasound behind the glass. The image was hard to read — a gray blur with a brighter blur inside it, the size of a kidney bean, attached to nothing I could recognize as human.

But Dr. Adler had pointed with her pen and said “There,” and I’d heard the heartbeat, fast and tinny like a watch ticking underwater, and my hands had gone still on the examination table for the first time in six years.

Eight weeks. I was eight weeks pregnant with a child I hadn’t told anyone about, standing in a kitchen I hadn’t chosen, in a house I’d never felt was mine. And I was about to walk upstairs and tell the man who owned all of it.

I’d practiced on the drive home. Sitting in the parking lot at Target with the frame in a plastic bag on the passenger seat, I’d said it out loud to the windshield: “I’m pregnant.

” Then, louder, the way you’d say it if you meant it to be good news: “We’re having a baby.

” Both sounded wrong. The first was a fact.

The second was a performance, and I’d done enough performing.

The hallway of the Back Bay townhouse was long and narrow.

Beckett’s mother had decorated it — Constance, who decorated everything in the Aldridge orbit — and it was lined with small paintings hung at exactly the height museum consultants recommended for domestic display.

I knew the height because I’d confirmed it with the consultant myself.

Forty-two inches to center. That was the kind of thing I knew.

Hanging heights. Caterers’ allergies. Which board member’s wife had quit drinking and needed sparkling water poured in a wine glass so nobody would ask.

The fact that the Gardner’s development director preferred emails before nine a.m. and calls never.

Six years of knowing things like that. Six years of running a world that carried Beckett Aldridge’s name on every wall and my fingerprints on every surface no one looked at.

I passed the living room. The Diebenkorn hung above the fireplace — the one Beckett had bought the year we married because I’d said I liked the way the light fell in it.

He’d taken that observation, a twenty-three-year-old from working-class Rhode Island pointing at a canvas in a Sotheby’s preview, and turned it into a purchase.

$1.2 million. He’d called it our first acquisition, “ours,” and I’d stood in the living room the day it arrived and felt something I didn’t have a name for yet.

Gratitude, maybe. Or the first small erasure — the moment my eye became his purchase and the line between them disappeared.

The painting was still there. Six years later it looked the same.

Everything in this house looked the same.

The orchids on the hallway table were swapped every two weeks by a service I’d arranged, and Beckett thought they happened by magic.

I was the magic. I was the thing that made the house run and the foundation function and the galas land on time and the board members answer his calls.

I was the infrastructure. And infrastructure is the thing you don’t see until it stops.

I took the stairs. His study was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway I’d hung with photographs from our honeymoon in Amalfi.

The photographs showed a version of us I still recognized: me in a sundress with paint on my thumb from a street vendor’s watercolor set I’d bought on impulse, him looking at me like I was something he couldn’t believe he’d found.

I’d been twenty-three. He’d been twenty-four.

We’d been married for eleven days and I’d already dropped out of RISD — three credits short of my MFA — because his world had opened around me like a door into a room I hadn’t known existed, and I’d walked through without looking at what I was leaving behind.

Three credits. I thought about that sometimes. Three credits and a thesis show I’d already half-installed, six canvases stretched along the south wall of the building on Benefit Street. My advisor, Moretti, had called twice. I’d let it ring.

That was six years ago.

The study door was open. Not all the way — a few inches, the way Beckett left it when he was on the phone and didn’t want to feel shut in.

He did that. He left things cracked. Doors, conversations, commitments.

It was one of the things I’d found charming once, the way a person who’s never been locked out of anything treats an open door like it costs nothing.

His voice came through the gap. Low, easy, the register he used with people who didn’t need anything from him.

Not his board voice. Not his gala voice.

His real one — the one I used to hear in bed in the first year, when he’d lay in the dark and tell me about the paintings he wished he could make and couldn’t.

“You see it,” he’d told me once, his hand flat on my sternum.

“The way light moves. I’ve never been able to see it the way you do. ”

I’d believed him. I’d believed that the thing he loved about me was the thing I was best at, and I’d let that love be the reason I stopped doing it.

Because running his world was a way of being near the art, near the galleries, near the rooms where light fell the way I used to paint it. Near it. Never making it.

I stopped outside the door.

I didn’t mean to listen. The frame was in my hands, the ultrasound behind the glass, and I was reaching for the knob when his voice came through with the loose warmth of a man who thinks he’s alone.

“No, I know,” he said. Then a laugh — short, surprised, like he hadn’t expected to find it funny. “I know. But she gets it. Elise gets it. She lost Cole too. She knows that weight. She doesn’t need me to perform.”

My hand stopped on the doorframe.

Elise. Elise Harding. Cole’s sister.

I knew her. Or I thought I did. The dark-haired curator Beckett had brought into the foundation’s orbit after Cole died in the climbing accident three years ago.

I’d met her at the memorial. She’d stood beside me in a black dress and shaken my hand and said “thank you” when I said I was sorry, and then she’d looked past me toward Beckett and her face had done something I didn’t have a name for at the time.

I’d planned that memorial. I’d booked the venue and coordinated the catering and selected the flowers for every Cole Harding event the Aldridge Cultural Trust had hosted in three years, and Elise had been at every one.

Quiet, angular, with her brother’s dark intensity and a habit of standing close to Beckett in a way I’d read as shared grief and never questioned.

Grief gets the benefit of the doubt. It gets the benefit of everything.

“I think about it,” Beckett said. Through the gap I could see a sliver of him — his shoulder, the edge of the mahogany desk, his hand turning his phone in slow circles on the surface.

He wasn’t holding it to his ear. Speaker.

He had someone on speaker, a voice I couldn’t quite make out — low, male, the encouraging rhythm of a friend giving permission.

“I think about options. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”

The friend murmured something.

“Options, yeah.” Beckett breathed out, a sound like settling into a chair that was already comfortable. “I have infinite options. I wasn’t sure at twenty-three, and I’m not sure now.”

The hallway went very still.

I stood there with the frame pressed flat against my chest and a heartbeat I’d heard four hours ago ticking inside me, and the man whose half of that heartbeat it carried said he wasn’t sure.

Not sure at twenty-three. Not sure now.

The friend said something else. I couldn’t catch the words, just the tone — the kind of low noise men make when they’re telling each other it’s fine to say the thing they already know they shouldn’t.

“It’s not that I don’t care about her,” Beckett said.

His voice was careful now, the way it got when he was constructing something — a pitch, an argument, a version of himself he could live with.

“It’s that I don’t know if caring is enough.

I look at Elise and I wonder what happens if I’d waited.

If I hadn’t met a girl at a fundraiser at twenty-four and made her my whole—” He stopped.

Started again, slower. “Arden was twenty-three. I was twenty-four. We didn’t know anything.

I saw her at the Gardner and she was standing in front of that Sargent with this look on her face, like she could see something inside it the rest of us couldn’t.

And I thought — I want that. I want to be near that.

So I married it.” A pause. “And now it’s been six years, and I don’t know whether I married her because I loved her or because I wanted to own the way she sees things. ”

I set my jaw. Held the frame. Did not move.