Chapter 3: What Marcus Knew
Marcus didn't speak for the first few minutes.
He kept both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, jaw set.
The wipers pushed rain across the windshield in steady arcs.
I sat in the back with one hand pressed flat against my stomach and the other braced against the door.
"Another one's coming," I said through my teeth.
"I know.
Breathe.
We're twelve minutes out."
He had driven me for four years.
Through deployments, through briefings at the Pentagon, through the long stretches when Grant was away and I was running a unit of three hundred soldiers from a desk that most people in my own home didn't know existed.
Marcus knew my schedule better than my husband did.
He knew which calls I took standing up and which ones made me sit down.
He had never once asked me about Grant directly.
Tonight he didn't have to.
"He didn't come with you," Marcus said.
It wasn't a question.
"No."
Another contraction.
I pressed my back into the seat and breathed through it the way I had been trained to breathe through things that hurt — steadily, without sound, without letting it show on my face.
When it passed, Marcus said quietly, "I'll stay at the hospital."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't."
He pulled onto the highway.
The rain was heavier now, the kind that turns headlights into smears of white and orange.
I watched it and thought about the name on Grant's phone.
Three letters.
A preview that had answered a question I hadn't known I was asking.
*Is she gone yet?*
Not *how is she*.
Not *is everything okay*.
Gone.
Like I was an inconvenience being waited out.
Like the evening had a schedule and I was the last item on it that needed to be cleared.
"Marcus."
"Yes, Colonel."
He only used my rank when something mattered.
"Do you know a woman named Diane Rourke?"
His hands shifted on the wheel.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"His phone.
Tonight."
Marcus was quiet for four full seconds.
The highway lights slid across the windshield one by one.
"She works in his firm's D.C.
office," he said finally.
"I've seen her twice in the past two months.
Once when I picked him up from a dinner he told you was a client event.
Once outside the building on a Saturday morning when he said he was playing golf."
I didn't say anything.
"I didn't tell you because I wasn't certain," he said.
"And because you were—" He stopped.
"Pregnant."
"Yes."
Another contraction hit, sharper than the last.
I pressed my hand harder against my stomach and focused on the road ahead.
The hospital lights were visible now, a pale glow through the rain.
"How long?" I asked when I could speak again.
"At minimum?
Six months."
Six months.
Our daughter had been growing for nine.
The math was not complicated.
Marcus pulled under the hospital canopy and had his door open before the car fully stopped.
He came around to my side, offered his arm, and walked me through the sliding doors without letting go.
The intake nurse looked up.
"Is your husband parking?"
"He's not here," I said.
She glanced at Marcus.
"I'm her driver," he said.
"And I'm staying."
They put me in a room on the third floor.
A nurse named Patrice set up the monitors, checked my pressure, and told me I had done the right thing coming in when I did.
The numbers were high enough to worry about.
Not dangerous yet, but close enough that they wanted to watch me carefully.
Patrice left to get the attending physician.
Marcus sat in the chair beside the bed, still in his coat, and said nothing.
My phone was on the tray table.
I looked at it for a long moment.
Grant had not called.
Not once since the door closed.
I picked up the phone and opened my contacts.
Not Grant's name.
Another one.
My attorney, Patricia Weld, who had been managing the Langley trust since my grandfather's estate entered probate.
It was nearly eleven at night.
I sent her a text anyway.
*I need to move the timeline up.
Call me when you can.*
I set the phone back down.
Patrice returned with the attending and two more nurses.
Things began to move quickly after that — monitors adjusted, an IV placed, quiet instructions exchanged across the bed in the efficient shorthand of people who do this every night.
I lay back and let them work.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, my phone lit up on the tray table.
Not Patricia.
Not Grant.
A number I didn't recognize.
Virginia area code.
May you like
The message was four words.
*We need to talk.*
