Zara’s POV
I woke up to forty missed calls and my name trending under a headline that called me a liar.
The first thing I registered was the buzzing, relentless, my phone vibrating itself halfway off the nightstand before I even opened my eyes.
Then the second thing, Ethan’s side of the bed, already empty, sheets cold, like he’d been gone for hours.
I grabbed the phone and the screen lit up with a wall of notifications stacked so deep I couldn’t read past the first few before more piled on top.
Forty-one missed calls now.
Noah, three times.
Amara Okafor, twice, which struck me as strange enough to notice even through the fog of just waking up.
A dozen numbers I didn’t recognize.
And texts.
So many texts.
Have you seen this??…
from a number I’d saved as Cordelia, of all people, the first time she’d ever reached out to me directly.
Call me the second you wake up Noah, sent four times in slightly different phrasing, each one more frantic than the last.
This is insane, are you okay Amara.
My stomach dropped before I even understood what “this” was.
I opened the browser with hands that had started shaking, and the first search result answered the question before I finished typing.
BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE CAUGHT IN PATERNITY LIE: LEAKED DNA REPORT SUGGESTS ETHAN VANCE ISN’T THE FATHER.
I read it three times before the words actually assembled into meaning, my brain refusing the sentence the way you refuse a wound before the pain catches up to the sight of the blood.
I scrolled down, hands unsteady, and there it was a document, photographed and leaked across half a dozen gossip sites within what looked like hours, a laboratory letterhead I didn’t recognize, Ethan’s name typed in one column and a percentage in another that made my chest cave in on itself.
Zero percent probability of paternity.
“That’s not real,” I said out loud, to no one, my voice sounding strange and distant in the empty bedroom.
“That’s not… I never even took a test. Nobody’s tested anything.”
But there it was, spreading across every platform I opened, the same document reposted with different commentary layered over it, strangers I’d never met building entire narratives about who I was and what I’d supposedly done.
Gold digger.
Fraud.
The words stacked up faster than I could process them, comment sections filled with people who’d decided everything about my character based on a single leaked page.
My phone rang again.
Noah, finally catching me awake.
“Zara.” His voice came out ragged, like he’d been crying or shouting or both.
“Are you okay? Have you seen it?”
“I’m looking at it right now.”
“It’s everywhere. It’s on every site, every feed, I can’t scroll five seconds without seeing your face next to some headline calling you a liar.” Something cracked in his voice.
“Of course it’s not real. I never took a paternity test. There’s no test to leak, Noah, because nothing’s ever been tested.”
“Then where did that document come from?”
“I don’t know.” My voice cracked on the admission, fear finally breaking through the numb shock that had carried me this far.
“I genuinely don’t know.”
“Okay. Okay, listen to me.” He’d pulled himself together somewhere in the last few seconds, some old instinct kicking in, the same protective reflex I’d spent years directing at him now turned back around toward me.
“Don’t read the comments. Don’t look at any of it more than you already have. It’ll just make you sick, and none of it’s going to help you right now.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“I know it’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s what you need to do anyway.” A pause, static crackling faintly on the line.
“Where’s Ethan? Has he seen it?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t in bed when I woke up.”
“Zara.” Noah’s voice went careful, cautious in a way that made my stomach twist tighter.
“What if he’s seen it already? What if that’s why he’s not there?”
The thought hadn’t fully formed in my own head yet, and hearing Noah say it out loud made it suddenly, horribly real.
Ethan waking up before me, finding this the same way I had, an entire internet’s worth of accusations laid out in his feed before I’d had a chance to explain, before I’d even known there was anything to explain.
“I have to go,” I said, already moving, already pulling on the nearest clothes I could find.
“I need to find him.”
“Zara, wait…”
I hung up before he could finish, my hands shaking too hard to properly button the shirt.
I’d grabbed, and made my way out of the bedroom into a house that felt different already, quieter, the household staff moving through the halls with the particular careful silence of people who already knew something terrible had happened and weren’t sure how to act around the person it had happened to.
Marta found me in the hallway, her face doing very little to hide the concern underneath it.
“Mrs. Vance.” She reached for my arm, steadying me before I’d even realized I’d stumbled.
“You should sit down. You look pale.”
“Where’s Ethan?”
“His office. He’s been in there since six this morning. He asked not to be disturbed.”
“Since six? What time is it now?”
“Nearly ten.”
Four hours.
He’d been sitting with this for four hours before I even woke up, and the thought of him alone in that office, staring at that fabricated document, building whatever conclusions he was building without me there to stop them, sent me moving again before Marta could say anything else.
I found the office door closed, which it almost never was during the day, and I knocked once before pushing it open without waiting for an answer.
Ethan sat behind his desk, jaw tight, a laptop open in front of him and his phone face-down beside it like he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.
He looked up when I came in, and something in his expression made my stomach drop even further than it already had, not anger, not yet, but something more frightening than anger. This story is hosted at NovelPing.
Uncertainty.
The particular look of a man trying to hold two irreconcilable truths in his head at once and failing to make them fit together.
“Ethan.”
“You’re awake.” His voice came out flat, careful, stripped of the warmth it usually carried when he said my name.
“I was going to wait until you woke up on your own. Didn’t want to…” He stopped, exhaled hard, and started again.
“Have you seen it?”
“Noah told me. I’ve seen enough.”
“Then you know what it says.”
“It’s fake, Ethan. I never took a paternity test. There’s nothing to leak because nothing was ever tested.” I crossed the room, needing to be closer to him, needing him to look at me properly instead of at some middle distance between us.
“You have to believe me.”
Something flickered across his face, and for one terrible second I genuinely couldn’t tell which way it was going to break, toward me, or away from me, toward trust or toward the particular exhausted suspicion that a month of betrayals from every direction might have finally taught him to default to.
“I want to believe you,” he said, quiet.
“I do. But Ethan, look at this objectively for one second a lab report exists. Someone generated it, printed it, leaked it. That doesn’t happen out of nowhere.”
“I don’t know where it came from. I swear to you, Ethan, I have no idea.”
“Then who would do this? Who would even have access to fabricate something like this?”
“I don’t know!” My voice cracked, frustration and fear tangling together until I couldn’t separate them anymore.
“But I know it’s not real, because I know what’s actually true, and you weren’t there for the test because there was no test.”
He was quiet for a long moment, studying my face with an intensity that felt like being examined under a light too bright to look directly into.
“Show me your phone,” he said finally.
“What?”
“Your phone, Zara. Show me. I want to see exactly what’s being said, what’s spreading, before I respond to any of it publicly.”
I handed it over, hands still unsteady, and watched him scroll through headline after headline with an expression that gave away nothing, the careful, guarded composure he wore for boardrooms settling back over his face like armor he’d forgotten to take off that morning.
“This is bad,” he said eventually, more to himself than to me.
“This is worse than bad. It’s already hit three major outlets. By noon it’ll be everywhere.”
“I know.”
“The board’s going to use this. Victor’s going to use this.” He set the phone down, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“This is exactly the kind of distraction he’s been looking for. A scandal he can point to, evidence I’m ‘compromised,’ just like he said in that meeting yesterday.”
“Ethan, I need you to hear me. I never took that test. Someone fabricated this.”
He looked up at me, and for a moment I thought I saw it, belief, real and unguarded, starting to surface underneath all the exhaustion and strategy calculations running through his head.
Then his phone buzzed again, and he glanced down at it automatically, and whatever had been building in his expression shuttered before I could be sure it had ever really been there at all.
I stared at the fabricated report glowing on my phone screen, at Ethan’s name typed next to a result that wasn’t true, and thought, he’s going to believe this before he believes me.