I Carried My Husband’s Mistress’s Baby and Walked Away novel Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

Julian hesitated, uncertainty flickering in his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “But you hurt her. I can’t just leave her. Claire… she’s with you. She’ll be fine.”

There was a time he used to shield me from everything.

There was a time he never made me the one left behind.

I swallowed the pain and looked at him calmly.

“Grandma, let him go.”

He clearly hadn’t expected me to be this “gracious.”

After all, back then, I’d screamed, begged, humiliated myself, and thrown away every scrap of pride just to keep him from walking out.

His gaze turned complicated, like he wanted to say something, but in the end he strode away anyway.

A nurse and a postpartum doula cleaned my incision and changed the dressing.

The baby was soothed back to sleep.

Then my phone lit up with a message from him.

Julian: [I forgot about your incision. I’m sorry. I just didn’t want a scene in the hospital. It would look bad and damage.

the Prescott family name.]

Julian: [Jenna’s unconscious and she needs someone with her, so I won’t come over. Get some rest

I stared at the screen for a long time.

I couldn’t stop seeing the old him, the one who once heard I’d been injured while he was out of state, got on a plane for

eleven hours, canceled everything, and stayed glued to my side just to take me to one checkup.

When I sighed, Grandma Evelyn snatched my phone right out of my hand.

She read his cold words and let out a sharp, furious snort.

That bastard,” she snapped. “Just wait until he comes back. Claire, don’t worry. Grandma…”

I laughed before she could finish, and met her eyes without a flicker.

“Wasn’t all of this something you allowed?”

“I don’t care what he does anymore.” I said. “You promised me that once I delivered this baby, you’d help me get divorced

I expect you to keep your word.”

Her expression froze, thick guilt settling into her eyes.

Chapter 2

I’m the one who wronged you,” she said.

“I already tricked him into signing the divorce papers,” she added quietly. “You can leave after thirty days of postpartum

recovery.”

She kept the baby with her and personally hired people to care for him.

I checked into a private postpartum recovery center under the guise of medical recovery, and it kept the worst of the

gossip away from me.

That night, though, the story still tore through finance circles, the Prescott heir going to war for his mistress,

abandoning his postpartum wife, defying the family matriarch, and shielding his wife’s half-sister like she was the only

one who mattered.

Prescott Group’s stock kept sliding, and Julian ran himself ragged trying to put out the fire.

Jenna’s relationship-influencer account on TikTok got swarmed, and the old story resurfaced, the one time I’d exposed

her for seducing her sister’s husband only for Julian to bury it.

The comments turned vicious, and without Julian cleaning up the fallout, she would’ve been deplatformed and forced to

pay breach penalties on her sponsorship contracts.

I didn’t see him again until seven days later.

The first thing he did was look at me with disappointment.

“Claire Nolan, are you happy now, getting revenge on us like this?”

I blinked, then understood right away.

He was pinning the entire gossip blowup on me.

Of course he was, since I used to work in media, and I’d been good at turning a spark into a wildfire.

The first time I’d gone mad and blasted his affair with Jenna across the internet, he’d threatened my employer with

lawsuits over privacy and defamation until they fired me.

These days, finding anyone willing to help me spread anything was nearly impossible.

I glanced at him without a trace of the old hurt of being misunderstood.

My hands kept moving over the things I’d bought for William’s death anniversary.

“You should know you’ve got more dirt than what’s already out in the open,” I said. “If I wanted to expose you, you’d be

bleeding cash all over again.”

He stood in the doorway for a long time, frozen.

Then he spoke, sounding almost helpless.

Chapter 2

“After this, I’ll cut her off.” he said. “But you have to promise me we’ll start over, okay? We have a baby now. We can be a

happy family.”

He’d said things like that almost every day while I was pregnant.

It never stopped him from staying tangled up with Jenna anyway.

Some days she was ‘pitiful” because of where she came from, and other days she was “alone” because she had no one to

rely on.

Either way, he always had a reason, and he always ended up protecting her like it was destiny.

He didn’t leave the doorway, like he’d decided he wasn’t moving until I answered.

With him blocking the sunlight, I gave him a perfunctory nod.

I didn’t realize what he meant by “after this” until the next morning, when the whole internet went feral over an

explicit photo-and-video leak of me.

Julian posted a “clarification” video.

In it, he told reporters with a grief-stricken face that my sister had discovered I’d been cheating during the pregnancy.

and that I’d repaid him for everything by spreading false rumors about him.