My Fiancé's Secret: A Wedding Day Betrayal

On the morning of my wedding, I found a voice memo my fiancé of seven years had saved from his 22-year-old intern.

But I still walked down the aisle, secretly pregnant with our child. Then, as we stood at the altar, she faked a faint.

Blake dropped my hand and ran to her, leaving me alone.

He called my heartbreak a "tantrum" while making his special tea-the one I taught him-for her in our apartment. He was certain our baby was his safety net, a guarantee I' d never leave.

"She's not going to do anything," he told his mother on the phone while I was at the clinic. "Just let her blow off some steam."

He thought my pain was a game and our baby was a bargaining chip.

He was wrong. He found me in the recovery room, striding in with a cocky smile and a bouquet of lilies. The smile died when he saw me, pale in the hospital bed, and the flowers slipped from his grasp as he finally understood what I had done.

Chapter 1

Evelyn Roman POV:

On the morning of my wedding, I discovered my fiancé of seven years had saved a voice memo from his twenty-two-year-old paralegal intern.

It wasn' t snooping. Not really. Blake' s phone was lying on the antique vanity in my bridal suite, right next to my own. Our wedding planner, a frantic woman with a clipboard and a permanently stressed expression, was having a meltdown over the floral arrangements for the archway. The florist wasn't answering her calls.

"Evelyn, honey, could you just try him from Blake' s phone? Maybe he' ll pick up for a man," she' d pleaded, her hands fluttering like trapped birds.

So I did. I picked up his phone, the familiar weight of it cool in my palm. The passcode was my birthday. 0814. It always had been. A small, silly thing that used to make my heart flutter. Today, it just felt like a fact.

His chat history was open, his chat with me pinned to the top. Clean. Normal. But my finger slipped as I went to the call log, accidentally tapping the 'favorites' icon in his messaging app.

And there it was. A single, saved voice memo. Not in a chat thread, but isolated in his favorites, like a treasured keepsake. The contact picture was a selfie of a girl with big, doe eyes and a calculated pout. Cali Beard. The intern.

My blood ran cold.

The bridal suite, once buzzing with excited energy and the scent of hairspray and champagne, suddenly felt airless. The joyful chatter of my bridesmaids faded into a dull roar, like the sound of the ocean from a great distance.

I pressed play.

A breathy, girlish voice, laced with something that sounded like a giggle, filled the silence of my mind. "Blake... everyone' s gone for the night. Are you going to come say goodbye to me?"

The way she said his name-not Blake, but Blaaake, stretching it out, coating it in sugar and suggestion-made my stomach clench. It was intimate. It was a secret whispered in a quiet office after hours.

I felt a wave of nausea so intense I had to grip the edge of the vanity to keep from swaying. My reflection stared back at me, a stranger in a cloud of white tulle and lace, her face a mask of disbelief. The diamond earrings Blake had given me as a wedding gift just this morning felt like tiny, cold weights pulling my earlobes down.

I played it again. And again. Each time, the calculated innocence in her tone chipped away another piece of the foundation I had built my life on.

"Evie? Everything okay?" my maid of honor, Sarah, asked from across the room.

I couldn' t speak. I just shook my head, my eyes locked on the phone.

When Blake walked in a few minutes later, looking impossibly handsome in his tailored suit, his smile was so bright it was blinding. He was the golden boy, the charismatic litigator who could charm a jury and win any case. He was the man I had loved since I was twenty-four.

He saw the look on my face and his smile faltered. "Evelyn? What is it? You look like you' ve seen a ghost."

I held up the phone. I didn' t have to say a word. He saw the screen, saw the name, and the color drained from his face. For a split second, I saw panic flicker in his eyes before it was replaced by a carefully constructed mask of calm. It was the same look he got in the courtroom right before he dismantled a witness.

"It' s nothing," he said, his voice smooth as polished stone. He reached for the phone, but I pulled it back.

"Nothing?" My own voice was a dry rasp. " 'Blaaake...' " I mimicked the breathy tone, and the sound was so ugly in the pristine white room that it made me flinch. "That doesn' t sound like nothing."

"Evelyn, calm down. It' s not what you think," he said, his tone dropping into that reasonable, placating register he used when he was handling a difficult client. "She' s just an intern. A kid. She gets a little starstruck. It' s harmless."

"Harmless enough to save? To favorite?" My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. "Blake, we' re getting married in less than an hour."

"I know that." He took a step closer, his eyes searching mine. "And I love you. This is just... a silly crush. I was going to delete it. It means nothing."

"Then delete it now," I said, my voice shaking. "And you tell her she' s being transferred. To another department. Another floor. Today."

I searched his face for any sign of hesitation. For seven years, we had been a team. Evelyn and Blake. Blake and Evelyn. We' d built a life, a home. We were a brand. His success was my success. My support was his foundation.

And just two weeks ago, I' d stood in our bathroom, staring at two pink lines on a plastic stick, a secret joy blooming in my chest. A baby. Our baby. I was going to tell him on our honeymoon in Iceland, under the northern lights. Our future, once a blueprint, was finally becoming real.

Blake looked at me, his handsome face a mixture of frustration and weary affection. "Fine," he sighed, as if I were being difficult but he was willing to indulge me. "Fine, Evelyn. I' ll have HR move her to the archives department in the basement first thing Monday morning. I promise. Now, can we please not let this ruin our day?"

He took the phone from my hand, his fingers brushing mine. He deleted the voice note, his movements swift and practiced. He showed me the empty screen. "See? Gone. It' s over."

But it wasn' t.

Because as the music started to swell and my father walked me down the aisle, my eyes weren' t on the altar. They were scanning the guests. And I saw her.

Cali Beard. Sitting in the third row, on Blake' s side, wearing a dress that was a little too tight, a little too short for a wedding. Her big, innocent eyes were fixed on Blake.

And as I reached the altar, as my father placed my hand in Blake' s, Cali' s eyes met mine. A flicker of triumph, quickly veiled by a look of doe-eyed vulnerability.

Then, just as the officiant began to speak, she made a small, gasping sound. Her hand went to her forehead, and her eyes rolled back into her head. She slumped forward, a delicate, dramatic faint, collapsing into the aisle.

A collective gasp went through the crowd. People started to murmur, to stand up.

But I wasn't looking at her. I was looking at Blake.

His head whipped around, his eyes instantly finding her crumpled form on the floor. "Cali!" The name was ripped from his throat, a raw sound of pure panic that had nothing to do with a concerned boss and everything to do with something much, much deeper.

He dropped my hand.

He started to move.

I grabbed his arm, my nails digging into the fine wool of his suit. "Blake, no." My voice was low, a desperate plea. "Don' t you dare."

He looked at me, but his eyes were distant, already halfway down the aisle. "She needs help, Evelyn. She has a heart condition."

"There are a hundred people here, Blake. A dozen doctors in your own family. Let someone else handle it." My grip tightened. "If you walk away from me now, right here, it' s over. I mean it. We are over."

He stared at me, his jaw tight. For a heart-stopping second, I thought he understood. I saw a flicker of the man I loved, the man I had spent seven years building a life with.

Then his gaze shifted back to the girl on the floor.

"I' m sorry," he said, his voice flat.

He pried my fingers from his arm, one by one. The gesture was not violent, but it was firm. Final.

And then he was gone.

He didn't just walk. He ran. He ran down the aisle, away from me, away from our wedding, away from the future we were supposed to build.

The force of his departure left me staggering. I swayed on my feet, the world tilting precariously.

A sharp, cramping pain shot through my lower abdomen, so intense it stole my breath. It felt like my insides were being twisted into a knot. I instinctively pressed a hand to my stomach, a silent, desperate prayer.

The Vera Wang gown, the one he' d said made me look like a queen, suddenly felt like a lead shroud, weighing me down, suffocating me. "You' re the most beautiful thing I' ve ever seen," he' d whispered at the final fitting, his eyes full of what I had mistaken for adoration.

He hadn' t even glanced back. He hadn' t seen the pain on my face. He hadn' t seen me falter.

A heart condition? This girl, this child, who spent her weekends hiking and running half-marathons according to her ridiculously public social media?

He left me, his bride, standing alone at the altar, because his intern faked a fainting spell.

The pain in my belly sharpened, a cruel, vicious punctuation to the shattering of my heart.