Chapter 1 - The Day I Burned My Baby’s First Ultrasound, I Thought I Was Saving Us From the Man I LovedThe first picture of my unborn baby burned in a freezing Chicago kitchen while the child’s father stood on television beside another woman and announced their engagement.
Two hours earlier, a doctor had smiled at me in a quiet examination room at Lakeview Women’s Medical Center.
“Six weeks and four days,” she had said, turning the monitor slightly. “Strong heartbeat. Everything looks exactly where we want it.”
I had stared at the tiny gray shape on the screen and cried so hard the technician handed me three tissues.
Now that same tiny shape curled black at the edges in my kitchen sink.
On television, Declan Voss stood beneath a wall of camera flashes wearing the dark charcoal suit I had helped him choose three weeks earlier.
Beside him was Savannah Calloway.
Pearl-white dress. Diamond earrings. One manicured hand resting possessively on his arm.
The news anchor called their engagement “an unexpected union between two of Chicago’s most influential private business families.”
Everyone in the city understood the translation.
Territory.
Money.
Loyalty.
An alliance no rival would challenge.
I watched Declan smile for the cameras, and something inside me went terribly still.
Only seven nights earlier, he had been sitting cross-legged on the floor of my restoration studio, holding a sandwich in one hand while I complained about someone using furniture polish on a nineteenth-century portrait.
He had looked at my paint-stained fingers and kissed the tips one by one.
“You know what this place is?” he had asked.
“A fire-code violation?”
“The only place in Chicago where I can breathe.”
I had laughed.
May you like
He had not.
Now he
