Chapter 1

While her husband walked out during labor because a woman from his past called from the airport and said she was alone, Emma lay beneath the hard hospital lights with a contraction tightening across her body and watched him pause beside his ringing phone as though the name glowing on its screen had reached into the room and touched him before he could stop it.

The woman was Olivia Hayes, the college love Daniel had once described with an uneasy half-smile as “the great almost,” and although years had passed since she moved to London and Daniel had built seven years of marriage with Emma, he listened to Olivia’s thin voice through the phone while the fetal monitor kept its steady electronic rhythm and Emma’s mother lowered the magazine she had only been pretending to read.

Olivia had landed unexpectedly at Logan Airport, Daniel said after ending the call, and she had nowhere to go, so he needed to take her to an empty Back Bay apartment he owned through his company, but Emma—sweaty, shivering beneath the hospital blanket, and already warned by her doctor that the baby’s position could force an emergency intervention—asked why a woman with no keys required her husband to leave his wife in labor.

“It will take forty minutes,” Daniel said, rubbing both hands over his face while the antiseptic smell of the room clung to everything, and when Emma told him to send an Uber, call an employee, or give Olivia access another way, he looked at her as if she were making trouble rather than asking him to remain where he belonged.

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A contraction seized Emma so fiercely that she could not speak for thirty seconds, and when it passed she whispered, “If you leave now, I will remember it,” while her mother stood between Daniel and the door and told him, “Emma might forgive you because she loves you, but I will not.”

Daniel promised he would be back before anything happened, kissed at the air near Emma’s forehead when she turned away, and disappeared into the hallway while the door clicked shut behind him and the room became colder than it had been a moment before.