My Celebrity Wife Thought I’d Never Leave

Chapter 5

Jason walked straight back into the bar, the heavy door thudding shut behind him. The air was thick with the smell of stale alcohol and lemon cleaner.

Behind the counter stood the bar owner, wiping down a glass. She was blonde, with her hair pulled into a messy bun.

"I need to see your surveillance footage from Wednesday night," Jason said, leaning over the counter. "Just the entrance and the parking lot."

The woman barely looked up as she continued polishing the glass with a rag. "Cameras are basically just for show. Half of them don't work, and the ones that do overwrite every twelve hours. I can't help you."

Jason stared at her, the headache from his hangover still throbbing behind his temples. As he looked at her blond hair, a wild, impulsive question slipped out before he could stop himself.

"Was it you? Were you the one who took me to a hotel last night?"

The moment the words left his mouth, Jason felt a sting of embarrassment.

The bar owner paused, then let out a sharp laugh. "Me? No."

She set the glass down and looked him up and down with an amused smirk. "If I wanted to sleep with you, I could've done it right here in the staff lounge. Why would I bother dragging a grown man all the way to a hotel?"

She leaned across the bar, grinning teasingly. "Besides, I like young pretty boys. Not worn-out, middle-aged men like you."

Jason's face darkened. Without another word, he turned on his heel and walked toward the exit, his pride wounded.

As he pushed past the velvet curtain near the door, he almost collided with a woman coming toward him.

Jason's gaze lingered on her.

She was tall and slender, dressed in a simple silk blouse and dark trousers. Long golden hair fell loosely over her shoulders, framing her fair skin and delicate yet striking features—a high, straight nose, full lips, and light-colored eyes that gave her a cool, mysterious beauty.

There was something vaguely familiar about her, almost hauntingly so.

For a split second, Jason opened his mouth, but after being mocked by the bar owner moments earlier, he stopped himself. He couldn't go around stopping every blonde woman in the city to ask if she was the one who had taken him away that night.

He lowered his head, stepped around her, and walked out.

Back inside his car, Jason sank into the driver's seat, his mood heavy with frustration.

He pulled out his phone and opened his messaging thread with Lauren again, staring at the sent text.

I've been drinking. Don't feel like coming home tonight. It's been forever since we did it in a hotel. Come over. I want it to feel like the old days.

Could he really have typed that and sent it to her without remembering a second of it?

Jason rubbed his face with both hands, feeling completely drained. 

He opened his contacts and sent a brief message to his superior in hospital, requesting a week of emergency leave. In his current mental state, examining patients or performing procedures was too risky.

He checked into a small hotel six blocks from the house he used to call home. The room was nothing special. A bed, a desk, a window that looked out onto a parking lot. He sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at his hands.

Nina is not my daughter.

Every time the thought came back, it hit just as hard as the first time. Fifteen years of birthday parties, school plays, bedtime stories, and late night trips to the emergency room when she had a fever. Fifteen years of thinking this little girl had his blood running through her veins.

All of it was a lie.

And what had he given up for that lie?

Jason closed his eyes and let the memories he usually kept locked away come flooding back.

Eighteen years ago, he had been one of the most promising young surgeons at Eastport General. His department head had recommended him for a fellowship at Johns Hopkins that would have put him on the fast track to becoming one of the top cardiac surgeons in the country. The kind of opportunity that came once in a lifetime.

He turned it down because Lauren was three months pregnant and said she needed him at home.

Two years later, he was offered a research position at the Mayo Clinic. He turned that down too because Lauren was in the middle of pilot season and couldn't handle Nina alone.

Every single time his career tried to take off, he had clipped his own wings to keep Lauren's world running smoothly. And she had let him do it without a second thought.

I could have been somebody. Instead I spent eighteen years being Lauren Chase's invisible husband and another man's unpaid babysitter.

That thought was the one that finally broke something inside him.

Three days passed.

Jason didn't call Lauren. Lauren didn't call him. The silence between them was louder than any argument they had ever had.

On the fourth morning, someone knocked on his hotel door.

He opened it and found Lauren standing in the hallway wearing oversized sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over her face. The disguise of a celebrity who didn't want to be recognized.

"This is pathetic, Jason." She pushed past him into the room and looked around with visible disgust. "You're living in this dump to prove a point?"

"I'm not proving anything. I'm just not coming home."

"You've had your little tantrum. It's been four days. That's enough." She pulled off her sunglasses and fixed him with a look that had made directors and producers back down for the last eight years. "Come home. Now."

Jason walked over to the desk, picked up a manila envelope, and held it out to her.

"What is that?"

"Divorce papers."

Lauren stared at the envelope like it was a dead animal he had just dropped in her lap.

"You're not serious."

"I've never been more serious about anything in my life." Jason's voice was quiet but there was nothing soft about it. "You cheated on me. Nina is not my child. This marriage is over."

"For the last time, I did not cheat on you!" Lauren's voice shot up an octave, her composure cracking like thin ice. "One lab report that could be completely wrong, and you're ready to throw away sixteen years? What kind of man does that?"

"The kind of man who got played for sixteen years and finally woke up."

"You're delusional." Lauren threw the envelope onto the bed without opening it. "I am not signing those papers. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever."

"You don't have to sign them." Jason picked the envelope back up and tucked it under his arm. "I'm filing them whether you cooperate or not."

"You think you can divorce me?" Lauren stepped closer until they were barely a foot apart, her perfume filling the small room, her eyes burning with a fury that would have made him back down a week ago. "Do you have any idea what I can do to you in court? My lawyers will eat you alive. You'll walk out of that marriage with nothing."

"I walked into it with nothing." Jason didn't step back. "So that's fine by me."

"Jason Hart, you ungrateful, stubborn, foolish man." Each word came out sharper than the last, her lips trembling with anger. "I made you. Everything you have, every comfort you've enjoyed for the last decade, came from me. And this is how you repay me?"

"You made me?" Jason repeated the words slowly, tasting the bitterness of every syllable. "Who paid the rent for ten years while you couldn't book a commercial? Who worked double shifts so you could keep auditioning? Who held your hand through every rejection and told you not to give up?"

Lauren's mouth opened but nothing came out.

"I made you, Lauren. And you repaid me by having another man's baby and letting me raise her like a fool."

Lauren grabbed her sunglasses off the desk, shoved them onto her face, and stormed out of the room. The door slammed so hard the mirror on the wall rattled.

That afternoon, Jason walked into the county courthouse and formally filed for divorce.

He sat alone on a wooden bench outside the clerk's office, the filed papers in his hands, waiting for the next step in the process.

Lauren did not show up.

Instead, a tall, broad-shouldered man stood at the door.

“We need to talk about Lauren and the child.”

He spoke with quiet authority, as though he were the father.