A BABY BEFORE GOODBYE

Chapter 1

James's POV

I felt it against my thigh — one sharp, insistent pulse — and I should have ignored it. Everything in that room, every set of eyes, every carefully arranged flower, every beam of light falling through the stained glass of The Savoy Banqueting Hall demanded that I ignore it.

Three hundred guests from the most powerful families in England sat in gilded chairs watching me. My father stood near the front row, his chest broad with pride he had never once directed at me as a person, only ever at me as a product. My mother dabbed the corner of her eye with a handkerchief, already rehearsing what she would say at the reception.

And Charlotte — Charlotte Ashford, in ivory silk, her father's money and her mother's cheekbones — stood across from me holding a small bouquet with trembling hands, waiting for the two words that would seal what our families had been engineering for the better part of a year.

I was supposed to say them. I had rehearsed them. I had even convinced myself, somewhere in the grey hollow space where feeling used to live, that I could mean them.

The phone buzzed again.

"James?" Charlotte whispered. Her eyes dropped briefly to my jacket pocket. "What are you —"

I pulled it out. I don't know why. I tell myself now it was instinct, but maybe it was cowardice dressed up as instinct — one last exit from a life I had never chosen. The number on the screen was one I didn't recognise. Unknown. I should have let it ring out. Every single person in that hall was watching me hold a phone at my own wedding like a man who had lost his mind.

I answered it anyway.

"This is James Whitfield."

"Sir." A woman's voice, clipped and clinical, the kind that belongs to people who deliver terrible news for a living. "We have a woman here — Rebecca Clarke. She collapsed outside St. Thomas' Hospital approximately twenty minutes ago. She's eight months pregnant and she's been unconscious since she arrived. We found your number listed as her emergency contact. Are you family? We need consent to proceed."

The banqueting hall didn't go quiet. It was already quiet. But something shifted in the air — some pressure dropped — and the room felt suddenly smaller, the ceiling lower, the walls closer, the three hundred faces blurring into one indistinct mass of witness.

Rebecca.

Becca.

Eight months.

I ran the arithmetic without meaning to. Seven months since she left. Seven months since I watched her pull her coat off the hook behind my front door for the last time and walk out without looking back, because I had told her — because my father had told me to tell her — that there was no future for us. That she was not what the Whitfield name required. That whatever we had was beautiful but it was not enough, and it never would be.

Seven months. Eight months pregnant.

The numbers sat in my chest like stones.

"Sir? Sir, are you still there?"

"Where," I said, and my voice came out like something dragged over gravel, "is she?"

"Emergency Room 3. Sir, we really need you to —"

I dropped the phone.

Not ended the call. Dropped it. It hit the marble floor and I didn't look down. I looked at Charlotte — at her wide, confused eyes, at the hurt already forming there before she even understood what was happening — and then I looked at my father, who was already half out of his chair, reading my face the way he had always read my face, like a balance sheet, scanning for the line where everything went wrong.

I held his gaze for one second.

Then I ran.

"JAMES." His voice cracked through the hall like a whip. "JAMES WHITFIELD, YOU COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW —"

My dress shoes hit the marble and slipped and I caught myself on a pillar and kept going. Behind me the room broke open — gasps first, then voices layering over each other, then my mother's sharp cry, then Charlotte, and the sound of Charlotte crying was the thing that nearly stopped me, because she had done nothing wrong, she was as trapped in this as I had ever been.

But Becca was eight months pregnant and she was unconscious on a hospital floor with my number listed as the only person she trusted in an emergency.

After everything. After all of it. Still me.

The doors swung open and the cold London air hit my face and I ran toward the street with my jacket open and my heart going to pieces, because she had kept me. Through all of it, she had kept me.

And I had almost let her die alone.