Chapter 2

I found a secluded corner near a service exit, away from the clinking glasses and forced laughter.

My camera hung heavy around my neck, a useless weight.

I had to see it again, to confirm the nightmare was real.

Peeking through a gap in a floral arrangement, I saw them.

Michael. Serena Cole. The baby.

They were a perfect picture, a hideous tableau of domestic bliss.

Michael leaned over the pristine white bassinet, his smile wide and genuine, the kind he rarely showed me anymore.

He tickled the baby under the chin. The baby gurgled.

Serena, looking radiant and smug, placed a hand on Michael's arm, her fingers possessive.

She looked up at him with adoring eyes.

My heart shattered. Not a clean break, but a messy, tearing agony.

He looked so natural there, so... devoted.

The word echoed from the earlier introduction. "The baby's devoted father."

Our mutual friends, people who had toasted our wedding, our pregnancy, were cooing over Serena's child.

They knew. Their smiles were too bright, their avoidance of my gaze too deliberate.

I was the outsider here. The ghost at their feast.

My own pregnancy, the child I carried, felt like a phantom limb, an inconvenient truth in their shiny, new reality.

He was building a life, a family, without me. While I was planning ours.

The air in my lungs turned to ash.

Disbelief warred with a sickening certainty.

This wasn't a mistake. This wasn't a misunderstanding.

This was a calculated, cruel deception.

And I had walked right into the middle of its celebration.