My Husband Annulled Our Marriage Because I Couldn’t Give Him An Heir — Then He Found Out I Was Secretly Pregnant

Part 1

The ink on the annulment paper smelled bitterly of crushed oak galls and vinegar.

That was the only thing I could focus on while the deafening silence of my husband’s study pressed down on me.

Brian slid the heavy parchment across his mahogany desk, the heavy gold of his signet ring scraping sharply against the polished wood.

Five years of marriage had just been erased by a bishop’s indifferent signature.

Under the suffocating layers of my woolen skirts, I pressed a trembling hand to my lower abdomen.

I kept my mouth shut tightly.

Let him think he won.

“It is finalized,” the solicitor said, his voice thin and reedy.

Brian did not even look at me.

He stood by the window, his broad shoulders rigid beneath his impeccably tailored navy coat.

He looked like a statue carved from sea glass and frost, entirely immovable and entirely closed off to me.

“The carriage is waiting to take you to the inn at the crossroads,” Brian said.

“From there, your transit to the coastal properties has been arranged.”

A sudden, violent wave of nausea clawed up my throat, tasting of copper and bile.

It wasn’t heartbreak that was making me sick.

It was the child.

The tiny secret currently knitting itself together inside my womb, demanding sustenance while its father clinically dismantled our lives.

I swallowed hard, forcing the bile back down.

“Keep your allowance, Brian.”

He finally turned to look at me, his gray eyes looking bruised around the edges.

“Don’t be foolish, Megan,” he said coldly.

“The coastal estate is practically a ruin, and you cannot survive on pride.”

“Watch me,” I replied, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.

Upstairs, my maid Brenda was weeping softly into a linen handkerchief as she packed my trunks.

“Pack the wool, the worsted linens, and the heavy cloaks,” I ordered her.

I moved to the vanity, leaving behind the heavy diamond necklace Brian had given me.

My hand hovered over a small crumpled piece of parchment tucked in the very back of the drawer.

It was the apothecary’s receipt for tincture of willow and ginger root.

The ingredients for morning sickness.

I snatched it up, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

If Brian found this, if he knew I was carrying his heir, he would never let me leave.

He would lock me in this gilded cage and claim the child for his lineage, leaving me as nothing more than a glorified incubator.

I tossed the receipt into the dying fire, watching it curl into gray ash.

The carriage ride to the coast took four agonizing days.

The hired coach smelled profoundly of wet sheep, and the leather seats were cracked.

The morning sickness did not politely confine itself to the mornings.

It was a constant, rolling tide of nausea that lived in the back of my throat.

Twice I had to force the driver to halt, stumbling out into the freezing mud to heave up my meager rations.

“Brian is sitting in his warm dining room right now,” a cynical voice whispered in my head.

When we finally arrived at the coastal estate, it was exactly as Brian had described.

It was a severe stone structure sitting on a bleak cliffside, staring blindly out at the churning gray ocean.

The inside smelled of abandonment, the dust coating the floorboards in a thick gray pelt.

The air was frigid, holding the deep dampness of a place that had not seen a fire in a decade.

That first night, Brenda and I slept in the parlor on a moth-eaten mattress pulled near a smoky fire.

I curled into a tight ball, pressing my cold hands against my stomach.

I hated Brian for his brutal pragmatism and his ability to sever me from his life like a dead branch.

But even as the hatred burned in my chest, I cried silent sobs for the terrifying uncertainty of the future.

For the next three months, I worked like a common laborer.

I refused to touch the allowance sitting in the city bank.

And all the while, my body changed.

By my fourth month, the hard plane of my stomach rounded into a firm, unmistakable swell.

I spent evenings hunched over a flickering candle, brutally taking out the seams of a brown woolen dress to accommodate my growing baby.

I was no longer a fragile, failing wife.

I was a creature of stone and sea salt, hardened by necessity.

“Just you and me,” I whispered to the wind as the baby kicked sharply against my ribs.

“We don’t need him.”

Then came the freezing morning when I was wrestling with a bundle of wet driftwood near the kitchen garden.

The wind was howling, pressing the heavy wool of my dress tightly against my body, revealing the undeniable curve of my pregnancy.

A piece of wood slipped from my numb fingers, landing in the mud with a wet thud.

I bent awkwardly to pick it up, holding a hand to my aching lower back.

The rusted iron gate suddenly shrieked open.

I whipped around, my heart leaping into my throat.

Brian was standing there, his expensive boots sinking into the muck.

His chest was heaving, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the sleet.

He stared at my swollen belly, his face completely drained of color.

For a long, agonizing second, we just stared at each other across the frozen cabbage stalks.

He took a staggering step forward, his voice sounding like it had been dragged over broken glass as he breathed my name.

I didn’t drop my gaze, and I didn’t feel a single ounce of relief.

“Get off my property,” I snarled, gripping the heavy piece of driftwood like a weapon.