I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 02

I Lost Our Baby While He Danced With Her Chapter 02

The next morning, I walked into Caldwell Memorial twenty minutes late, still in yesterday’s clothes.

Renee, the attending at the station next to mine, stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “Department review day with the big boss, and you dare stroll in late and skip the meeting?”

I just smiled.

Grant never waited for me. Not for anniversaries, not for ultrasounds, not in a hospital lobby during a hurricane. I wasn’t going to wait for his meetings anymore.

The morning was light. Between charts, I opened my laptop and started drafting the divorce petition for real this time. Clean. Professional. No alimony requests. I wanted nothing from him except my own name back.

Grant appeared out of nowhere, the way he always did—like weather.

“You don’t act like a wife should.” His voice was low, meant only for me, because God forbid anyone here learn he had one. “Staying out all night. What point are you trying to prove?”

I nodded, kept typing, answered offhandedly. “Don’t worry. It won’t happen again.”

It wouldn’t. Divorced people don’t owe each other curfews.

He paused, thrown by my calm. He was used to me flinching. “Dinner tonight,” he said. It wasn’t an invitation. It was a sentencing.

His eyes flicked to my screen. “Since when do you read family law?”

I gave a slight smile. “Since you stopped explaining where you spend your nights, you don’t get to ask what I read.”

His jaw tightened. He walked away.

At six, a reservation confirmation buzzed on my phone—the rooftop place, the expensive one. His version of compensation. Grant’s apologies always came with a price tag and never with the word sorry.

As I left the building, I saw Bree Vance climb into his car at the curb, laughing, her hand on his sleeve. He drove off. Two minutes later he texted me: Running late. Wait at the hospital.

I didn’t wait. I went to the restaurant alone, ordered the wagyu I always wanted and never ordered because he said red meat was “for people with no discipline.” I ate both portions. I drank the wine he would have sent back.

He never showed.

I wasn’t angry. I’d been five years hungry at his table. One more empty chair changed nothing. As long as he signed, I could starve gracefully somewhere else.

It was almost midnight when I got home. The lights were on.

Grant was waiting. Actually waiting—a thing he had never once done in five years of marriage, while I canceled friendships and birthdays and entire versions of myself to wait up for him with hangover medicine and hot food. He used to say I hovered like an old nanny.

“You almost stayed out all night again,” he said coldly.

“Oh,” I answered.

His eyes narrowed. “Do you know what day it is?”

Our fifth anniversary. My hand drifted, on instinct, toward my bag—where the gift I’d bought him weeks ago still sat. Back when there were three of us in this marriage and one of them had a heartbeat.

I didn’t take it out.

He thrust a gift box at me instead, irritation flickering across his face. “I had it made for you. Open it.”

I took the box and tossed it, unopened, onto the sofa. “That’s very kind of you,” I said politely.

Politeness from me seemed to disturb him more than screaming ever had.

“I missed dinner because Bree’s father is my patient—his case is critical, I have to see it through—”

“It’s fine,” I cut in gently. “No need to explain. I understand.”

I meant it. That seemed to enrage him most of all.

“Stop being jealous all the time,” he snapped. “You’re a surgeon. Act like an adult.”

I looked at this man—brilliant, exacting, allergic to his own wife—and thought about the discharge papers folded small in my coat pocket. The ones from his own hospital. The ones with a diagnosis he would recognize in half a second.

I could have ended him with one sentence.

Instead, I went to sleep in the guest room.

He still didn’t know that two nights ago, his wife had been a patient in his own ER.

And I intended to be gone before he ever found out.