Pregnant and overworked, Valerie is barely holding her marriage together. When a betrayal pushes her past her limit, an unexpected ally steps in. As lines blur between love and endurance, Valerie is forced to ask herself the hardest question of all: What do you do when loyalty becomes its own kind of loss?
If someone had told me that pregnancy would feel like both a blessing and a betrayal, I don’t know if I would have believed them. And yet, there I was, 35 years old, six months pregnant, the size of a mini-planet, and trying to decide if my marriage was worth salvaging. Mark hadn’t worked since 2023.
At first, I supported the break. He’d been laid off and said he needed “a little time” to reset. I was okay with that.
I adored him. And we were a team. Besides, I had a stable job with decent maternity benefits.
We’d be okay. Even then, a part of me wondered how long I could keep carrying both of us on my back before something inside me cracked. But then “a little time” turned into over a year—a year of me working full-time, watching our savings shrink while Mark kept saying he needed “just a bit more time to figure things out.”
The pregnancy came later, and with it a new kind of exhaustion.
I’m talking about swollen ankles, sore hips, constant pressure in my lower back, and cravings that made absolutely no sense. One night, it was peanut butter on toast at midnight. The next, it was strawberries dipped in cream cheese.
And I kept a pack of saltines in my desk drawer because someone at work swore they helped with morning sickness. They didn’t. And while I was giving up everything, from dinner dates to my favorite lavender oat milk lattes, Mark refused to let go of his most precious ritual: a weekly massage with a woman named Tasha who, according to him, “just knew his body.”
Each session cost $250.
Every single week. That was $1,000 a month on massages. One evening, I looked at our grocery list and felt my chest tighten.
I had to cross off half of what I’d planned. Meanwhile, Mark booked his next massage like it was a prescription he couldn’t skip. “Mark,” I said as I sat on the living room floor, sorting through a pile of baby clothes I’d picked up at a secondhand sale.
My back ached from standing too long, and my ankles looked like someone had stuffed tennis balls under my skin. “Honey, I can’t pay for your massages anymore. We need the money for the baby.”
He didn’t even look up from his phone.
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