25: Chapter 0025: Was I Really The Problem All Along?
25: Chapter 0025: Was I Really The Problem All Along?
Elena’s Point Of View “Clara, take these,” I said, pushing the thick stack of blue shipping manifests across the dark oak desk.
“The supplier in Milan needs the final sign-off before four today, or we lose the shipment of heavy silks for the autumn line.” Clara stepped forward, her heels clicking softly against the hardwood floor.
She took the folders, hugging them tightly against her beige blazer, her brow furrowing slightly as she studied my face for a moment longer than necessary, the way she always did when she sensed something beneath the surface of my calm.
“I’ll fax them over immediately, Mrs.
Sinclair.
Is there anything else you need before I head to the front desk?” “Lock the outer door,” I said, my voice quiet, flat.
“And don’t let anyone in for the rest of the afternoon.
I’m shutting my phone off.” Clara hesitated, her fingers digging into the edge of the folders.
A flicker of concern crossed her features, quickly smoothed over by years of professional discretion, the kind that had made her indispensable to me long before any of this began.
“What if…
what if Mr.
Sinclair calls down?
Or comes by?
He’s called three times this week asking for your schedule.” “Most especially him,” I said.
I didn’t look up from my desk.
I kept my eyes fixed on the silver pen resting between my knuckles, watching the light catch its polished surface as though it were the only solid thing left in the room.
“If Graham shows up, tell him I left for a site visit.
Tell him I’m in a meeting.
Tell him whatever you want, Clara, just do not let him past that waiting room.” “Understood,” she murmured softly, her voice gentling in a way that told me she suspected more than she let on.
“I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed.” The heavy oak door clicked shut behind her, the lock turning with a sharp, final sound that echoed like a gunshot through the silence of the room.
The moment the latch caught, the rigid posture keeping my spine straight completely collapsed.
I slumped back into the leather office chair, my breath escaping me in a long, shuddering exhale that rattled deep in my chest.
For the first time all day, I let my face fall, let the mask I’d worn since dawn crack and slide away like something dissolving in rain.
My hands, resting on the desk, finally stopped pretending to be steady.
Seven days.
It had been an entire week since that night at the club.
Seven agonizing, suffocating days of living like a ghost inside my own life.
Seven days of walking through my own house with my head down, feeling like an intruder in the home where my name was carved into the silver on the dining table.
I had turned the brass key in the guest room lock every single night, sleeping with a heavy wooden chair wedged firmly under the handle while Graham stood outside in the dark hallway, knocking until his knuckles turned white, calling my name until his voice turned rough and hoarse.
Each night I lay rigid on unfamiliar sheets, listening to him plead through the door, hating myself a little more for not opening it, and hating him more for making me want to.
I would press my palm flat against the wood sometimes, as if I could feel the warmth of him through it, then hate myself for that too.
I had left the house at six every morning before the household woke up, sneaking down the back servant stairs like a thief, avoiding the kitchen, avoiding his mother’s sharp, triumphant gaze, avoiding Lillian’s quiet, round-bellied presence sitting in the sunlit breakfast nook sipping herbal tea.
Some mornings I sat in my car in the driveway for ten minutes before I could make my hands stop shaking enough to drive.
I would stare at the garage door, willing myself to breathe normally, rehearsing the calm expression I would need to wear the second I stepped through the atelier’s front entrance.
I sat in the quiet of my office, the harsh afternoon sunlight streaming through the tall arched windows, casting long, geometric shadows across the rug.
The silence pressed against my ears until it felt like its own kind of noise, thick and expectant, as though the room itself were waiting for me to break.
It still felt like a nightmare I couldn’t scream my way out of.
Every single morning when my eyes opened against the unfamiliar floral wallpaper of the guest room, my brain spent three glorious, fleeting seconds believing I was home.
Believing that Graham was lying beside me, his heavy arm wrapped tightly around my waist, his warm breath fanning against the crook of my neck while the coffee pot hummed downstairs.
For three seconds, I was just a woman loved by her husband.
Then memory would return like a slap, and I’d remember exactly why the wallpaper was wrong, why the arm around my waist was only ever a phantom limb of a marriage that no longer existed.
Those three seconds had become the cruelest part of my day, a small mercy that made the following grief sharper each time.
I kept waiting to wake up.
I kept waiting for the terrifying, surreal haze of the last month to dissolve into a bad dream, for Graham to walk in, wrap his arms around me, pull me into his chest, and tell me it was all a sick mistake.
That there was no paperwork.
No open marriage.
No other woman carrying his blood under our roof.
I kept waiting for us to go back to the way we were before the lawyers, before the sterile dinners, before the contract.
I kept waiting, and waiting, and nothing ever came.
Somewhere in me, a stubborn, foolish hope still lingered, refusing to be reasoned with, refusing to accept what my eyes had already confirmed.
But the room stayed cold.
The pillow beside me stayed empty and smelled of nothing.
I had been banished to the guest wing of my own home simply because my body refused to perform the one basic function required of a Sinclair wife.
I pushed myself out of the chair, my limbs feeling heavy, like I was moving through knee-deep water.
My heels dragged across the Persian rug as I walked toward the full-length gilded mirror tucked into the far corner of the room, right beside the dress forms draped in half-finished velvet gowns.
Even the dresses looked more alive than I felt, their fabric catching the light while I merely absorbed it, a dull surface incapable of reflecting anything back.
I stopped in front of the glass.
The woman looking back at me looked completely hollowed out.
Dark, bruise-like purple circles hung heavily under my eyes, making them look sunken, glassy, and far too large for my face.
My skin was pale, devoid of any natural flush, my lips dry and chapped from biting them every time I felt like screaming.
I looked like a shell.
A ghost wearing an expensive designer dress, pretending to be alive.
I almost didn’t recognize the woman staring back… she seemed like someone I used to know, a long time ago, before all of this, before the version of me who still believed love could be enough.
Slowly, my hands trembled as I reached down, my clumsy fingers hooking under the hem of my silk blouse.
I unbuttoned the bottom three buttons with shaking fingers and lifted the delicate fabric, exposing my pale, flat stomach to the harsh afternoon light.
Small, faded violet dots mottled the skin around my navel and hips.
Needle marks.
Dozens of them.
The lingering, permanent scars from five relentless, agonizing years of hormone injections, brutal IVF protocols, daily blood draws, and experimental fertility treatments.
Five years of letting doctors stick cold metal into me, scrape my insides, pump my veins full of synthetic chemicals that made my hair fall out in clumps and my head pound for days on end… all so I could give Graham a child.
All so I could see him hold a baby that had his soft blue eyes.
All so I could hear his mother say, just once, that I was worthy of his name.
I traced one faded mark with my fingertip, remembering the particular sting of that injection, the particular hope I’d pinned to it, the particular way that hope had died a week later in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl with a negative test clutched in my fist.
I raised my right hand, my fingers shaking violently as I pressed my thumbs against the faint, bruised skin over my lower abdomen.
A single, hot tear spilled over my lower lash, trailing down my cheek and dripping off my chin onto my bare skin.
Then another.
Then a flood, unstoppable now that the dam had finally broken.
A choked, ragged sound tore out of my throat, breaking the heavy silence of the office, sounding like something broken inside me had finally snapped completely in half.
“Is my womb really dead?” I whispered to the glass, my voice cracking so hard it hurt my throat.
“Is there really…
is there really nothing inside me?” I pressed both palms flat against my stomach, digging my nails into my skin through the silk of my skirt, sobbing so hard my shoulders heaved, my whole body shaking violently in the silent room.
“Can’t I really give my husband a child?” I squeezed my eyes shut, fresh tears pouring down my face, hot, bitter, and unstoppable, washing away the carefully applied makeup, leaving me raw and exposed.
“Why couldn’t I just give him one?
Just one…
God, please, just one baby…” His mother’s words, spoken at the dining table with such smooth, effortless cruelty, echoed in my ears, louder than the sound of my own weeping, burning into my brain like hot iron: A failure.
A barren leech who wants to suck this family dry yet has absolutely nothing to show for it.
I covered my face with my hands, my palms catching the flood of warm, wet tears as my knees gave out completely.
I sank down onto the hard floorboards right there in front of the mirror, my silk skirt pooling around me like spilled water.
I sobbed into my hands, my chest heaving, the quiet room magnifying every broken, humiliating gasp for air.
Somewhere beneath the grief, a small, exhausted part of me wondered how many more afternoons I could survive like this before there was nothing left of me to break, before the last fragile thread holding me together finally gave way entirely.
Looking at it now, the truth was so ugly, so clear, and the proof was right there living in our house.
It was standing on the grand staircase in a pale silk robe, holding its belly.
Lillian was pregnant with his child after two years of slipping through the side gates in the dark.
The paternity tests were clear.
The bloodline was secured.
He didn’t need a medical miracle anymore.
He didn’t need to stand beside me in sterile clinic waiting rooms while I cried into my hands after another negative test, holding my shoulders and telling me we’d try again next month.
He had achieved in two years of secrecy what I couldn’t give him in five years of devotion, tears, and ruined health.
In five long years, I had never even been able to boast a single positive line on a cheap plastic stick.
Not even a miscarriage to prove that something had tried to live inside me.
Just empty, bloody months, one after the other, followed by another round of needles, another ultrasound, and another massive bill signed, while his mother raised an eyebrow in disgust.
I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the mirror, my chest aching so deeply, so physically, I thought my ribs might actually crack open under the pressure of the sob lodged in my throat.
I wept until my throat was dry and raw, until my hands were wet, until I had no breath left to give, rocking myself back and forth on the floor like a child.
In that moment I was not the head of my compant, not a Sinclair, not anyone’s wife at all…
just a body curled small on the floor, grieving something that had never even had the chance to exist.
I thought of all the names I had never let myself say out loud, the nursery I had never let myself imagine, the years I had spent guarding my heart against a hope that had betrayed me anyway.
“Was I really the problem all along?” I sobbed into the empty room, my forehead resting against my own pale, broken reflection.
“Was it always just me?”