My Billionaire Husband Left With Her After I Told Him I Was Pregnant

He told me he loved me for the first time on the morning our contract expired. By that afternoon, I was holding a positive pregnancy test and he was on a flight to Milan with his childhood best friend, Greta.

Our one-year marriage was a business transaction for his family’s jewelry empire, Sinclair & Mercer. A publicity stunt to stabilize the brand after a scandal. I was the temporary wife, chosen for my anonymity. Julian was the reluctant heir. I just didn’t know I was the only one who considered the contract a ticking clock.

His mother, Estelle Mercer, reminded me of my place with the subtlety of a diamond-tipped drill. “The paperwork is with the lawyers,” she’d say, placing the prenuptial agreement next to my breakfast plate. Greta was always there, a fixture from his past who knew all the stories I didn’t. She was the woman his family had always wanted for him. He never spent a Friday night with me if Greta needed consoling over a broken nail.

The betrayal wasn’t in another bed. It was in the hospital waiting room when I thought I was losing the baby, and his assistant answered his phone. “Mr. Mercer is in a critical acquisition meeting. Can I take a message?” It was in the way he’d look at Greta’s designs for his new collection with a pride I’d never seen directed at me. I was the secret he was contractually obligated to keep, while she was the partner he celebrated with the world.

The final break came at the company’s centennial gala. A photographer asked us to pose for a portrait as “the happy couple.” Julian’s smile was a perfect, polished shield. But when Greta stumbled on the staircase, he was there in an instant, his hand on the small of her back, his face etched with a raw, genuine fear I had never inspired. He never cheated. I almost wish he had. The lie would have been simpler.

I left my wedding ring on his polished office desk, right on top of the finalized dissolution papers. Did he even notice I was gone before he noticed the ring was missing? And when he finally reads the ultrasound photo I left behind, will the heir to an empire finally understand what his priorities have cost him?

There is no cheating in this book.