Chapter 2 – The Message That Came Instead of Him

My name is Megan Carter, and three years ago I married a man I genuinely believed loved me. Ryan was the founder and majority shareholder of Carter Logistics Group, a mid-sized freight company he’d built with his father’s initial investment and, for the first two years of our marriage, an obsessive work ethic I mistook for ambition rather than what it eventually became — a very convenient excuse.

The overnight trips started in my second trimester. Client dinners that ran until 2 a.m. Conferences he never once asked me to attend. I told myself this was simply what running a company looked like from the outside.

Ashley Reyes joined Carter Logistics as an outside consultant eight months before I gave birth, brought on, Ryan told me, to “streamline vendor contracts.” I met her exactly twice, both times at company functions where she was polished, professional, and entirely unremarkable in the way people are when they’ve decided in advance not to be noticed by the person they’re least interested in impressing.

The night I went into labor early, three weeks ahead of my due date, I called Ryan from the hospital parking lot before I could even get through the front doors. No answer. I called again from triage. No answer. By the time doctors were prepping me for an emergency C-section after Noah’s heart rate dropped, I had called fifteen times.

Something important came up. Don’t make this into drama.

I remember reading that message on a nurse’s phone, because mine had been taken to be charged, and I remember deciding, somewhere in the fog of anesthesia and fear, that I would never again mistake Ryan’s absence for an accident.