“I’ll give you a moment to look over the menu,” she said, and turned as if she were walking away from a stranger’s table, not the wreckage of a marriage.
Chris stood so fast his chair scraped the floor loudly enough to draw attention.
“Wait,” he said, voice rising before he could stop it. “Where have you been? Why did you leave?”
Lily stopped, but she didn’t turn around.
Vanessa grabbed his wrist with a smile that had lost its charm. “Sit down,” she hissed. “You’re making a scene.”
Chris barely felt her touch. His eyes stayed on Lily’s back, then dropped to the shape of her belly, and a question he was terrified to ask forced its way out anyway.
“The baby,” he said, his voice rough. “Is it mine?”
Lily turned slowly.
Up close, Chris noticed what he hadn’t seen from across the table: the exhaustion around her eyes, the dryness of her lips, the small marks on her hands that looked like the evidence of long shifts and hard survival. She didn’t look like a woman who had left for something glamorous.
She looked like a woman who had fled.
Lily’s gaze stayed locked on him, and when she spoke, her voice remained controlled even though her eyes didn’t.
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