My Husband Had a Child With Someone Else While I Was Carrying His Chapter 06

My Husband Had a Child With Someone Else While I Was Carrying His Chapter 06

The days in that hospital room turned unbearably long. All I could do was lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

The nurse’s aide, Janet Smith, was a hard-faced woman, and every day she brought me the same bland meals right on schedule.

Lucas had taken my phone away, saying the radiation wasn’t good for me, and he left me a cheap old handset with no SIM card so I could still check the time.

Then one day, a nurse came to change my dressings and left a phone behind by accident. The screen was still lit, open to a WhatsApp chat. It was a family group called One Big Happy Family. Something made me swipe it open.

Sally had posted a long message.

Sally: [Thank you all so much for checking in. The baby’s fever finally broke. I know Rachel’s never really warmed to me, but I never imagined she’d get jealous enough to try and hurt a newborn.]

Sally: [If Lucas hadn’t gotten there in time, I couldn’t even let myself think about what might have happened. I don’t blame her, though.]

Sally: [She’s about to become a mother herself, so it’s probably just the prenatal depression messing with her head.]

A string of replies followed.

Summer: [You’re too kind for your own good, Sally. Rachel’s been really unstable lately, paranoid about everything.]

Samuel: [Poor Lucas, stuck with a crazy woman like that.]

Nicole: [Lucas, you need to watch Rachel closely. If she so much as touches a hair on the Halls family’s firstborn grandson, I’ll make her pay.]

Lucas replied with a single line.

Lucas: [Understood. I’ll handle it.]

I read through the lines on the screen, and a strange calm came over me.

There was no anger and no sense of injustice, only a feeling of how absurd it all was. So this was what I had become in their eyes, a dangerous woman who might snap at any moment.

I set the phone back where I’d found it and pressed the call button by my bed. The head nurse came in. “Ms. Bennett, is there something you need?”

I looked at her. “I’d like to pull the security footage from that night.”

Her eyes darted away, and she fumbled for words. “Ms. Bennett, the timing really couldn’t be worse. The camera system happened to be down for maintenance that night, so nothing was recorded.”

I closed my eyes, because it was exactly the answer I had expected. Lucas held shares in this hospital, so wiping a stretch of footage was nothing to him.

Janet walked in carrying a basin of water, and the moment she spotted the head nurse, her face split into a wide smile. “Don’t listen to a word she says, ma’am.”

“This one has a real temper on her. Yesterday she yanked out her own IV and then swore up and

down that I did it.”

“Mr. Halls already warned us. She’s got a bad case of paranoid delusions, so we’re just supposed to

bear with her.”

I watched Janet in silence, my eyes on the expensive silk scarf peeking out of her pocket. It was Sally’s favorite brand.

So it wasn’t only the footage. Even the people around me had already been bought.

I had been cut off completely, boxed into a corner where no help could reach me.

Every voice had been silenced, and every truth had been buried, and I had become nothing more than a madwoman trapped in a hospital bed.

Footsteps sounded outside, and then Lucas pushed the door open, carrying a container of food from my favorite restaurant. “Rachel, how are you feeling today?”

He opened the lid, and the smell filled the room. “I had them go easy on the salt for you. Go on, try

it.”

Watching him play the gentle, devoted husband made my skin crawl. He did the cruelest things in

the calmest, most reasonable voice.

“Lucas.” I kept my head down and picked the nuts out of the bowl one by one. “How long do you

plan on keeping me locked up in here?”