Part 2A Ten Year Severance

I stood alone in the cavernous, silent house, staring at the screen.

Available balance: $80,016.00.

Eighty grand a month. Nearly a million a year. I let out a dry, rattling laugh. I guess I was a high-earner after all. I should be the poster child for the domestic labor movement.

I was pathetic. Ten years of sacrificing my career, my body, my mind, and my entire identity, only to be classified as the help. And because I had willingly made myself entirely dependent on him, they knew I had no leverage. They knew they could do whatever they wanted.

Marcus and I met in college. He was exactly like this back then—brilliant, devastatingly handsome, and completely walled off. Girls threw themselves at him and he froze them all out. I was the only one stupid enough, brave enough, to keep chipping away at the ice until I thought I found a heart underneath.

I used to feel so secure. I thought his emotional unavailability meant no other woman would ever put up with him.

What I failed to realize was that back then, women gave up because he was just a broke undergrad with a bad attitude. Today, he was a tech billionaire. The math had drastically changed.

Watching Stella walk out my front door, escorting my husband and my son to a lunch I wasn't invited to, felt like a physical blow.

And Hudson. The boy I had nearly died giving birth to. I hadn't let a nanny touch him for the first five years. When he was burning with a fever at 3 AM, I was the one rocking him. I cooked every meal, packed every lunch, curated his entire existence.

Yet, as he grew, he absorbed Marcus’s coldness like a sponge. I used to comfort myself, thinking that because I was his primary caregiver, he would eventually soften toward me.

The reality was a cruel joke. Hudson idolized the father who barely knew his middle name. He mimicked Marcus’s disdain for me. When Stella called me a maid, Marcus didn't correct her—and so Hudson didn't either.

The bile rose in my throat. I rushed to the powder room, clutching the edges of the marble sink, and vomited until my ribs ached.

I looked up at my pale, sweaty reflection in the mirror. Then, I looked at the calendar on my phone. My period was two weeks late.

A cold dread pooled in my stomach.

I booked the first available appointment for the next morning.

When I walked out of the clinic, I was clutching a white envelope. Seven weeks pregnant.

I pressed my hand to my flat stomach, standing on the sidewalk as the city rushed by around me. The timing was almost a sick cosmic joke. Just when I had finally found the clarity to leave...