Chapter 2Sterilized After Your Betrayal

I accepted. The first thing I saw was a pinned post from two weeks ago. A wedding.

A real wedding. Claire in white, Bennett in a tuxedo, Jamie between them, all of them laughing under a canopy of wisteria.

Claire had told me she was in London for a merger that weekend. I had stayed up all night worrying because she hadn't texted. While I was staring at the ceiling, she was promising forever to another man on a cliffside in Big Sur.

I scrolled down. It was a curated gallery of a life I wasn't part of. Family trips to Disney, weekends in the Hamptons, Christmas mornings.

Everything I had begged for—the simple intimacy of a shared vacation—was their everyday reality.

The final blow was a locked album he’d sent me a link to in a DM. Thousands of photos of Claire. But these weren't the stiff, professional headshots she let me take. These were candid. Claire laughing with a smear of flour on her nose; Claire sleeping; Claire looking at the camera with raw, unfiltered adoration.

Whenever I tried to take a photo of her, she’d swat my hand away. “I’m not a child, Nigel. Put the phone away. It’s tacky.”

She wasn't camera-shy. She just didn’t want to be captured by me.

Claire walked back into the room, her phone tucked away. She wrapped her arms around my waist from behind, a practiced, hollow gesture of affection.

“Nate, I’m sorry I kept it from you so long. I’ll make it up to you. Next time, I promise, it’ll be just us.”

She said it so easily. As if five years of systemic gaslighting could be brushed away with a "next time."

I wrenched myself out of her grip.

“I don’t want a next time! You’ve lied to me for half a decade. You think I’m that pathetic?” I felt the heat behind my eyes, the sting of humiliation. “We’re done. Get out.”

I realized, with a sickening jolt, that I couldn't even say the word divorce. There was nothing to divorce.

Claire’s face hardened. The mask of the doting “wife” slipped, revealing the cold CEO underneath. “A man in my house doesn't throw tantrums, Nigel.”

She saw my tears and her voice softened, though it was the softness of a parent talking to a deluded child. “Jamie will learn to call you Dad eventually. As for the ‘legal’ part… to the rest of the world, you’re the man of this house. Why obsess over a piece of paper?”

“Because it’s a lie!” I shouted, the dam finally breaking. “It’s not fair! None of this is fair!”

She looked at me as if I were a tragic, broken thing. “You’re the only man who lives here. Bennett is just family. You should be set an example. Bennett’s birthday gala is tomorrow night. I expect you to be there, and I expect you to be composed.”

She turned and left without looking back.

She didn’t come home that night. Instead, she appeared in Bennett’s stories. The woman who claimed she hated the smell of grease was in a kitchen, covered in flour and butter, laughing as Jamie threw dough at her.

Then, an anonymous DM hit my inbox. A video.

It was grainy, shot in a hospital five years ago. A doctor was walking out of a delivery room with a crying newborn. Bennett stumbled into the frame, sobbing, grabbing the doctor's coat.

“The doctor just told me… I’ll never be able to have kids,” Bennett wailed into the camera. “No one will want me. I’ll never be a father. Claire, are you really going to leave me like this?”

Claire was there, holding the baby. She looked torn, her eyes darting to the door where I was presumably waiting in the hallway.

The baby in the video was loud, healthy, and very much alive.

Then Claire spoke, and the sound of her voice made my ears ring. “Go tell my ‘husband’ the baby died. Tell him there were complications.”