Chapter 7 - The Pregnancy That Never Existed
Maya was not pregnant.
She had let Luke believe she might be.
For almost two months she told him her cycle was late, then said stress had caused a false alarm.
During that same period, Kenneth paid for fertility testing in her name.
The tests showed no major reproductive problem.
The bank payments from Kenneth covered consultations, hormone panels, and a reproductive-law retainer.
Why involve lawyers before there was a pregnancy?
The answer came from a draft agreement recovered from Kenneth’s safe.
It was not enforceable.
It had never been signed.
But it revealed what they were discussing.
Maya would attempt pregnancy with Kenneth after both divorces were filed.
Kenneth would pay her housing and medical expenses.
They were also discussing how to handle the public story so Luke and I appeared to have driven them together after two “emotionally dead” marriages.
My reproductive history was part of the narrative.
Kenneth wrote in one email:
Sabrina will look obsessed with frozen embryos while we move on with an actual family.
Maya replied:
Then they need to be gone before she can turn them into a reason to keep you tied to her.
That was the pattern.
The embryos were not valuable because Kenneth wanted them.
They were valuable because I did.
Their existence gave me a legal interest he could not control alone.
Maya wanted them removed because she saw them as a relationship between Kenneth and me that could survive divorce.
An irrational way to think about embryos.
A very human kind of jealousy.
Claire asked me whether I intended to use them after divorce.
“I don’t know.”
That answer mattered.
I had been so focused on stopping Kenneth from destroying them that I had not confronted what I actually wanted.
Using embryos created with an ex-husband carried legal, ethical, and emotional problems I could not solve inside a courtroom.
The immediate issue was simpler.
They were partly mine.
Nobody had permission to erase the decision for me.
The second layer of evidence came from Kenneth’s digital calendar.
Three appointments appeared under vague titles.
“C consult.”
“DTC paperwork.”
“S evaluation.”
The last occurred four days before the affair photographs became easy for me to discover.
That timing bothered Claire.
“You said they became careless recently?”
“Very.”
“Maybe careless wasn’t the word.”
She asked me to reconstruct exactly how I discovered the affair.
May you like
For the first time, I considered that Kenneth might not have failed to hide it.
He might have wanted me to see enough to react.
