Returning home from a nine-day luxury vacation with my mistress, I expected my exhausted wife to forgive me, only to find the nursery completely empty.

Grant moved like an automaton, his limbs heavy and disconnected from his will. He did not turn on the foyer chandelier. He did not hang up his suit jacket. Clutching the heavy manila envelope against his ribs, he began to climb the grand staircase, his leather shoes dragging against the white oak treads.

Each step felt like an ascent toward a gallows. With every riser he cleared, the silence of the second floor pressed down upon him with greater weight. He reached the mezzanine landing, his eyes instinctively drifting down the wide, carpeted gallery toward the east wing—toward the nursery.

The double doors of the nursery were partially open, resting an inch ajar, exactly as Corinne had left them twelve days ago.

Grant walked down the hallway, the plush runner muffling his footsteps. He pushed the doors open with a trembling hand, the brass hinges gliding without a sound.

The nursery was bathed in the pale, cold wash of the evening twilight filtering through the sheer linen drapes.

The room was gutted.

The hand-crafted crib, carved from solid maple by Corinne’s grandfather, had been dismantled and removed, leaving only four clean indentations in the plush wool carpet. The changing table, with its wicker baskets of lotions and powders, was gone. The rocking chair—the oversized velvet glider where Corinne had planned to spend hundreds of quiet midnight hours singing lullabies to their boy—had vanished.

On the pale blue wall above where the crib had rested, four distinct, unfaded rectangular patches remained in the paint, marking the exact spots where the framed ultrasound photographs and the watercolor print of the nursery rhyme had hung. The nails were still in the drywall, bare and sharp, casting tiny, needle-like shadows down the wall.

Grant walked into the center of the empty room, his knees finally giving way.

He sank down onto the carpet, collapsing in the exact spot where the crib had stood. He pulled his knees toward his chest, the heavy navy wool of his suit bunching around his frame, his expensive leather shoes scuffing against the baseboard.

He reached out with his left hand, touching the empty wool fibers of the carpet where his son should have been sleeping.

Owen.

He barely knew the boy's face. He had seen him for twenty minutes in the hospital recovery ward, wrapped in a hospital blanket, his tiny, mottled face pinched in sleep. Grant had held him awkwardly, self-consciously, afraid of rumpling his bespoke shirt, before handing him back to Corinne so he could take an urgent phone call from his land surveyor in the hallway. He had told himself there would be plenty of time later. He had told himself that infants didn't know the difference anyway, that fathers became important when the boy was old enough to throw a baseball, to visit job sites, to be groomed for the family firm.

He had believed he had decades.

He looked down at the sealed envelope resting in his lap. The white paper caught the faint blue light from the window.

His fingers found the edge of the reinforced red filament tape. His hands were shaking so violently that he could barely grip the paper. He took a ragged, shuddering breath, the scent of the freshly painted nursery walls—clean, sterile, and childless—filling his lungs like dust.