Whenever the memory of her first, lost angel drifted through her mind, a sharp, suffocating spike of agony would pierce Clara's chest.

That child had seemingly used his brief, tragic existence to deliver a final, thunderous warning, forcing her through devastating grief to see the true, predatory nature of the man sleeping beside her.

Meanwhile, Ethan remained entirely submerged in the manic joy of impending fatherhood.

He retrieved the luxury nursery items that had spent months gathering dust in the deep corners of the garage, hauling them up to the living space one by one to meticulously buff away the grime with a soft cloth.

The beautiful little garments and tiny crystal bottles seemed to reclaim their luster beneath his fingers, matching his desperate longing for the fresh life.

Midway through his chore, an unexpected spark of excitement flashed across his features.

He snapped his head up, his eyes burning with an unhinged intensity as he looked at Clara. "Clara, I’m clearing my corporate schedule for a block of leave. We are going to London."

London was the sacred backdrop of Clara’s university years.

She held an intense, artistic devotion toward that city, speaking of it with a rare warmth throughout their marriage.

Once upon a time, Clara would constantly loop her arms around his neck, eagerly describing how she would take him through the cobblestone streets, show him the historic libraries of her youth, and let him feel the ancient, romantic heartbeat of the city.

But during that chapter of their lives, Ethan was desperately clawing his way up the corporate ladder, tracking metrics and logging eighteen-hour days that left absolutely zero room for an escape.

Later, when his financial empire finally stabilized, his life became a blur of endless high-stakes networking dinners, entertaining global clients, and traveling across continents, forcing their travel plans to be pushed into the distance over and over again.

And after that, Clara had managed to conceive, requiring her to remain strictly bedridden under medical protocols that barred her from leaving the penthouse.

Consequently, that dream of London had remained a distant, unfulfilled fantasy.

Now, the words barely out of his mouth, Ethan abandoned the nursery items on the floor and pulled out his phone, frantically loading a travel application to search for premium international flights.

"How does the afternoon departure tomorrow look to you?"

He checked the flight numbers on the screen, demanding her input with a frantic, childlike eagerness, his mind already projecting beautiful images of them walking together through Covent Garden.

"We land at five in the evening, check into a boutique hotel, grab some authentic local pub food, and spend the night walking along the River Thames."

Ethan spun out the itinerary in an unbroken rush of excitement, his features bright with a raw, desperate hunger for the trip to fix them.

"Wait, what was the name of that incredible little restaurant you mentioned? The one with the terrace view right over the Tower of London?" He squinted, trying to extract the detail from their old conversations.

"Le Pont de la Tour," Clara murmured, her voice flat.

Ethan’s eyes lit up instantly. "Yes! That’s the one! And what about that local dish you tried that made you gag instantly..."

"Jellied eels," Clara offered, a faint, humorless smile touching her lips.

"Exactly! That bizarre stuff! Everyone online says it's an acquired taste, but I want to experience it alongside you."

Ethan looked entirely like a man who had successfully stripped away the cynical skin of a ruthless billionaire, reclaiming a fragment of the raw innocence of their youth, acting as though the horrors of the past months had been completely wiped from the record.

Clara watched the performance, her lips curving into a soft, beautifully practiced smile that remained entirely freezing.

She delivered the rejection with an intense, quiet gentleness. "The first trimester is the most unstable, dangerous period for a pregnancy. I’m afraid international travel is completely out of the question for me."

Ethan froze, the manic joy draining from his features in an instant.

But he recovered within a heartbeat, slapping his palm against his own forehead in a show of rehearsed self-reproach. "Look at me, completely swept up in the moment. How on earth could I overlook something so critical?"

"We will simply delay the trip until after the baby is safely delivered. When the time comes, I’ll spend the entire vacation capturing portraits of you cradling our child!"

He forced his enthusiasm back to the surface, his eyes wide with a desperate plea for her to participate in the fantasy of their restored family.

"Alright," Clara whispered softly, her gaze remaining completely hollow.

She knew with absolute finality that these beautiful, glittering dreams were nothing more than the solitary delusions of a guilty man.

Inside her own chest, the landscape of their marriage was a dead, frozen wasteland.

Chapter 19

Clara emerged from the surgical wing after enduring the agonizing, soul-crushing termination, her physical frame trembling with an intense, hollow weakness.

The moment she stepped clear of the recovery ward, her vision blurred with exhaustion.

Mechanically checking her phone, she found a string of urgent, missed alerts from her mother.

After a long beat of hesitation, she connected the line.

"Clara, are you truly carrying a child again?"

The instant the call bridged, her mother's voice flooded the receiver, thick with a nauseating, greedy satisfaction.

"...Did Ethan report this to you?"

Clara’s voice was a raspy murmur, laced with a profound exhaustion; she had underestimated how rapidly Ethan would leverage the news of her pregnancy to secure her family's allegiance.

"Your younger sister’s marital settlement requires a top-tier Bentley to save face. My personal accounts were running tight, so I reached out to Ethan for a small advancement. Now your sister's dowry looks magnificent; she will possess immense leverage when she joins her husband's estate."

Clara's mother delivered the explanation with absolute entitlement, acting as though draining her wealthy son-in-law to subsidize her preferred daughter was a fundamental law of nature.

Hearing the words, a sudden rush of blood hammered against Clara's temples, a white-hot fury exploding in her chest. "Have you completely lost your mind, Mother?"

Clara’s voice cut through the air, sharp and unyielding. "If your personal capital was short, you should have marched straight to me! What right do you possess to beg Ethan for money?"

"What do you know about family strategy? A son-in-law of his stature is equivalent to a blood son. In the future, he is legally expected to cover the entire cost of your sister’s townhome anyway. A baseline luxury vehicle is nothing more than pocket change to a billionaire!"

Her mother remained entirely unshakeable in her greed, viewing Clara's marriage solely as a corporate asset to be bled dry for the collective family, while Clara's personal dignity was completely irrelevant.

"You've finally displayed a shred of intelligence by getting yourself pregnant again. The last time you ran home threatening a divorce, you nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought you were genuinely stupid enough to walk away from a fortune."

She continued her rapid-fire monologue, completely oblivious to the fact that Clara had passed the point of absolute fury.

Clara gripped the phone so violently her knuckles turned a sickly, bloodless white. Taking a long, heavy breath to stabilize her lungs, she delivered the words with an intense, quiet finality: "You were entirely correct the first time, Mother. Ethan and I are getting a divorce."

"The pregnancy has been terminated. I just stepped out of the abortion clinic!"

The declaration landed like an absolute explosive charge, instantly blowing her mother's voice into a stunned, suffocating silence.

The exact second she terminated the call with her family, before her lungs could even process the air, Ethan’s mother violently bridged her own line. "Clara, dear, Ethan just phoned to inform me of the pregnancy."

Her mother-in-law opened the conversation with a thin layer of rehearsed warmth, but the words that followed instantly turned Clara's blood to ice.

"Here is how we should manage this: the absolute moment you hit the four-month mark, you will undergo an advanced ultrasound to determine the sex. If the scan reveals a female fetus, you will terminate the pregnancy immediately."

She delivered the command with a chilling, clinical indifference, acting as though the life in Clara's womb was a defective piece of inventory to be discarded without a thought.

"Don't you dare take an attitude with me over this. You possess absolutely no concept of how aggressively sought-after my son is in the elite marriage markets right now," Ethan's mother continued, her tone dripping with a blatant arrogance and total contempt for Clara's position.

"Just yesterday, I visited an exclusive matchmaking event for high-society families, and a magnificent young heiress approached me directly. She looked me in the eyes and said, 'Ma'am, if you force your son to sign the divorce papers, I will marry him tomorrow. I will gladly bear him three sons without a single complaint!'"