a wife's regret // chaelisa

prologue

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

What do you mean, you're pregnant? What about your studies? We were going to wait, Chaeyoung, remember? Just tell me you're joking?" Chaeyoung felt her wife's furious words strike her like boulders. She stared up into Lisa's livid face and didn't recognize the woman standing in front of her. She was shocked, that was all. Lisa was thrown by her news. Her words would sink in soon enough and she'd go back to being the woman she adored, the wonderful woman to whom she had entrusted her heart. She just needed to give her wife time to get over her shock. The more she tried to rationalize her inexplicable reaction to what should have been joyous news, the more the insidious little voice in the back of her mind kept telling her that she was lying to herself. This was a side of Lisa that she had never seen before—one that Lisa had never allowed her to see—and she was terrified of what that said about their two-year marriage.

"I know that it's sooner than we'd planned," she said softly, trying to maintain an even tone of voice. "But this is the reality of our situation now, and it can't be changed. We're having a baby . . . a baby, Lisa. Don't you get how wonderful that is?"

"I can't believe you did this. I can't believe you would stoop to this," her wife gritted out bitterly. "This was supposed to be a joint decision. I'm not ready for this, Chaeyoung. I don't want a kid, damn it!"

"But it's our baby. We made it together," she protested, trying and failing to keep the pain and confusion from her voice. She tried to find a glimmer of her kind and loving Lisa beneath the mask of anger and frustration that she was displaying, but she wasn't there. She wondered if she had ever been there.

"You mean you made it, without my consent." Chaeyoung could barely meet her eyes, and she was grateful for that because the tears that she had been struggling to keep at bay were finally winning the battle.

"I don't know why you're being like this," she cried. "I didn't plan this; it just happened. Our birth control failed. I asked the doctor and he said that if I'd had a stomach virus or anything like that it could have provided a window of opportunity. And remember? I was sick a couple of days before your company party three months ago." Lisa strode out of the conservatory without a word and she followed her as she made her way downstairs to their en suite. She watched in sick disbelief as she opened the medicine chest and yanked out her birth-control pills.

"What are you doing?" She tried to maintain her composure as her wife counted the pills left in the box and felt the hope that she had been clinging to shrivel up into a tiny ball inside her chest and die. She felt nauseated as she watched the woman she had married turn into a monster right in front of her. Slowly the confused mortification turned to fury. How could Lisa do this to her? How could she humiliate her like this?

"God, have you been chucking pills down the drain every night?" she wondered out loud, and she found herself almost hating her for asking the question.

"You know I wouldn't do that."

"Do I? Well I obviously don't know you as well as I thought I did, do I?"

"Of course you know me, Lisa." She tried to appeal to the reasonable woman who had to be in there somewhere and laid a tentative hand on her rigid forearm, but Lisa yanked her arm away and turned away from her.

"Get out of here," Lisa whispered harshly, and Chaeyoung felt something give way and break at those four words.

"What?" She must have misheard her. Still she tried to give Lisa the benefit of the doubt.

"Get the hell out," she said before turning to face her. Chaeyoung tried not to flinch when she saw her face. There was nothing there—no anger, no regret, just a blank mask. She didn't know this woman at all. "Go now."

She sobbed, whirled from the room, and did as she had commanded. She fled.