The Wife Who Labored Alone

The night before her billionaire husband, Gavin Callahan, left for London, she begged him to stay, but he kissed her goodbye and flew out for seven months to open his company’s first overseas base with Rebecca Kendall, the ex-fiancée turned business partner who always knew his plans first.

A week later the pregnancy test was positive, and Rebecca still shut the news down, answering his private phone to say it was nothing urgent and later breaking into their anniversary call with papers he had to sign immediately.

She would not summon him home out of guilt, so she waited, until labor started a month early in a storm and he counted the months, grasped what she had handled on her own, and remained in England for the opening-night party.

Their son was born without him. Gavin is pressing his way back, asking for visits, listing every bottle in a drugstore notebook, and uncovering how his partner kept him in London.

She has quit waiting by the phone, because the landscaper from three houses down, who got her through the flood to the hospital and who has a little girl of his own, comes when he says he will, and Gavin must choose her over London, even if it costs him everything he built there,

before the divorce goes through.