I turned my heavy gaze toward my husband, desperately panning for a single ounce of the empathy I had long ago stopped expecting to find. “Aaron,” I whispered, the word catching in my dry throat. “I need to sit down. My back is spasming, and the baby has been kicking non-stop. I feel dizzy.”
His practiced, charming smile dissolved instantly into a mask of cold irritation. “Rebecca, please,” he muttered, keeping his voice low so as not to shatter his own illusion. “Paul is right in the middle of a crucial story. Do not interrupt the flow of the evening.”
“I am not trying to interrupt anything,” I said, swallowing down the thick, metallic taste of rising panic. “I just need a moment to take the weight off my feet.”
He waved a dismissive hand in the air, his eyes securely locked on his wine glass. “Just go grab the gravy. You know how this pregnancy makes you overreact to every little ache. Paul understands. Hormones, right, Paul?”
Paul let out a high, awkward bark of a laugh, his face flushing deeply as he nodded along, playing the role of the complicit audience. “Yeah, man. Totally normal. My sister was the same way.”
A tight, cold coil of absolute despair tightened around my ribcage. Before the hot prickle of tears could betray me and spill over my lashes, I turned sharply and shuffled back toward the kitchen.
As I walked, I desperately tried to remind myself of the world I had willingly walked away from. I had been raised in a sprawling, chaotic house filled with towering stacks of legal briefs, fierce intellectual debates at the dinner table, and an atmosphere of quiet, unshakeable authority. I had grown up surrounded by brilliant minds who drafted public policy and argued before appellate courts that fundamentally shaped the laws of the nation.
But I had deliberately concealed all of that when I first met Aaron. I had wanted, so desperately, to be loved simply. I wanted affection free from the heavy, suffocating calculations of my family’s legacy. I wanted a man who loved me, not my pedigree.
