The morning I discovered my husband had gotten another woman pregnant, I was three months along with my own pregnancy. I remember the exact moment—standing in our bedroom in Quezon City, Marco’s phone vibrating on the nightstand while he showered, a text message glowing on the screen: The doctor confirmed it. I’m carrying your child. What do we tell your mother?
My hands went numb. The phone slipped from my fingers onto the bed as if my body had decided to reject the information before my mind could fully process it. I sat down slowly, one hand instinctively moving to my still-flat stomach where my own baby—Marco’s baby—was growing, unaware that it would be sharing a father with another child due just two months later.
When Marco emerged from the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist, water still dripping from his hair, he found me sitting there with his phone in my lap, my face carefully blank in the way you learn to compose yourself when the ground has just opened beneath your feet but you’re somehow still standing.
“Elena,” he said, and the way my name came out—not surprised, not panicked, just resigned—told me everything I needed to know. He’d been expecting this moment. Probably dreading it, but expecting it nonetheless. “How long?” I asked quietly.
He sat on the edge of the bed, keeping distance between us. “Six months. It wasn’t… it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
“Is there a way it was supposed to happen? A better way to have an affair and get your mistress pregnant while your wife is also carrying your child?”
“Clarissa isn’t my mistress.” He said it defensively, as if the label mattered, as if calling her something else would somehow make the betrayal less complete. “My mother introduced us. She’s the daughter of one of Papa’s business partners. Mama thought… she thought it would be good for the family if—”
“If what, Marco?” My voice was rising now, the careful composure cracking. “If you married her instead? If you had a backup plan in case I didn’t produce the right kind of heir?”
His silence was answer enough.
I’d known, of course, about my mother-in-law’s obsession with grandsons. Aling Corazon Dela Cruz had made her expectations abundantly clear from the moment Marco and I got engaged three years ago. The Dela Cruz family business—a sprawling empire of real estate holdings and construction companies built over three generations—needed a male heir. Never mind that we were living in the twenty-first century. Never mind that I had a master’s degree in business administration and had been successfully managing one of their subsidiary companies. Never mind that their own daughter, Marco’s sister Patricia, was a brilliant corporate lawyer who could have run the entire operation with her eyes closed.
None of that mattered to Aling Corazon. She wanted a grandson, and she’d made it clear that my primary value as Marco’s wife would be determined by my ability to provide one.
I’d laughed it off at first, thinking it was just old-fashioned talk, the kind of outdated thinking that would fade once we actually started our life together. Marco had assured me his mother’s opinions didn’t dictate our marriage. He’d promised we’d make our own choices, build our own family, on our own terms.
Apparently, those promises had expiration dates I hadn’t been informed about.
“Does she know?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. “Your mother. Does she know about Clarissa’s pregnancy?”
Marco nodded slowly. “She’s the one who suggested… she thought if Clarissa and I… and if the baby was a boy…” He couldn’t even finish the sentence, couldn’t quite bring himself to say out loud what they’d been planning.
I stood up, suddenly needing distance from him, from this room, from the life I’d thought I was building. “I’m going to Cebu. To my parents’ house.”
“Elena, please, we need to talk about this—”
“Talk about what, exactly? About how your mother orchestrated a backup wife for you? About how you went along with it? About how I’m supposed to raise my child in a house where I’m being evaluated against my husband’s pregnant mistress—I’m sorry, his mother’s chosen business arrangement?” I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and started pulling clothes from drawers with shaking hands.
“The baby you’re carrying could be a boy,” Marco said desperately. “You could still—”
I stopped, turned to face him with a clarity I hadn’t felt in months. “Could still what? Win? Compete? Prove my worth by producing the correct gender of child?” I shook my head. “I’m not doing this, Marco. I’m not raising my baby in a family that sees children as chess pieces in your mother’s dynasty planning.”
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