Why did you gift Bella a child and then kill him right away?
To show Bella's desire to have children at 36? She could just verbalize it, like Nora and Sage did.
To invent a reason for James and Bella's breakup?
When infidelity or other serious situations occur, adults get divorced, not run away from home. In your mind, James is both some military man and a 12-year-old who ran away from home.
He's a grown man, not a boy who got lost and couldn't find his way home for three years.
You're missing the fact that no one knows where he is now. If he had simply moved, then Bella/the police/the government would know where he is now. It would be possible to file for divorce. But NO ONE knows.
He's an emotionally immature and superficial person. Because of him, Bella lost her job. He's obsessed with sex. I don't know why you assumed Bella was happily married to him. Rewatch her flashback with James in the library.
There's no point in creating a dead character just to illustrate another character's personality trait. That's not how stories are written. Even with Linnet, we communicate through her diary.
I've seen many times in D&D games where people write their character's backstory and then, for some reason, make their parents dead. You can't do anything with dead characters.
Such a thing as the death of a child has a profound effect on a character. For example, today we discussed Jill's father's drinking. The same would have happened to Rusty if he had killed James. Stop imagining things about the nursery.
View attachment 5447098