“Wait — please, wait!” He ran after her.

Nellie tried to move faster, and one of the crutches snapped in half. She went down hard on the frozen ground. A few volunteers rushed to help her up.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, covering her face.

Alistair knelt in the mud a few feet from her. “Let me help you,” he said quietly.

She looked back at him with angry tears standing in her eyes.

“You helped me plenty,” she shouted, “when you threw me out of your house while I was pregnant.”

The reporters heard every word. The cameras came back up, and his media manager’s efforts to stop them were already too late.

Alistair couldn’t move. “Pregnant?”

Nellie pressed her lips together, the look of a woman who’d just let slip a secret she meant to keep forever. With a volunteer’s help she got to her feet and made her way back to the tent.

“Nellie, I never knew about a baby,” he called after her.

She pulled the blue tarp shut between them.

He stayed on his knees while the flashes went off around him, and the past came at him all at once. The day he’d asked for a divorce, after she lost their third pregnancy.

His mother, Katie Carpenter, telling him a family like theirs needed a son to carry on the business. Olivia Gilbert, daughter of a pharmaceutical magnate — and the enormous contract he’d signed the same season he married her.