Part 1

My husband offered me $250,000 to disappear with our daughter while I was ten centimeters dilated and barely able to breathe.

The cashier’s check landed on the hospital tray beside a stack of gauze. Garrett Hale didn’t even look up when the monitor registered another contraction. He adjusted his navy blazer, glanced at his watch, and set a document with several yellow tabs in front of me.

“Sign where it’s marked, Brooke. The lawyer already reviewed everything.”

The agreement said our daughter would live with me, but that he would pay no child support. Another clause barred her from using his last name. He meant to decide the rights of a child who hadn’t been born yet.

“You can’t sign away her rights for her,” I managed to say.

“Don’t start with your speeches. Kendra had my son two weeks ago. A boy. He’ll carry my name and get everything he’s owed.”

Kendra Mercer was the marketing director at Pacific Harbor Freight, the company where Garrett had worked his way up to vice president of sales. She had once told me the father of her baby was a married man who didn’t want to show his face.

I doubled over around my belly. Dr. Laura Benson reached for the nurse call button, but Garrett kept talking.

“I’m giving you a dignified way out. You’ll never see that much money in one place again. You raise your girl, and I go on with my family.”

I looked at him the way you look at a stranger holding the keys to your house. We had been married six years. For three of them, he had convinced me that asking for respect was overreacting and that my career as a purchasing analyst got in the way of his. I had quit my job after a miscarriage and kept doing consulting from home, though he bragged to everyone that he supported me.

His contempt for a baby girl didn’t surprise me. Since the twenty-week ultrasound, he had asked whether they were sure of the sex and made jokes about how expensive it would be to put a daughter through college. What he didn’t know was that, weeks later, at an appointment he refused to attend, the specialist had spotted a second baby. I never managed to finish that conversation at home. Garrett cut me off to announce he was flying to Dallas, and after that he stopped asking about the pregnancy at all.

“I need you to leave,” I said.

“Sign first.”

“If you want a signed paper while I’m in labor, you’ll have to wait until my children are born and I’ve talked to an attorney.”