Ethan’s POV
Every lawyer in that building told me to release a statement distancing myself from her.
I fired the first one who suggested it.
It was barely ten-thirty when the legal team assembled in the main conference room, seven of them plus Gerald, laptops open, a draft statement already circulating before I’d even finished reading the worst of the headlines myself.
“We need to move fast on this,” said Whitcombe, our head of external counsel, a man I’d worked with for six years and never once had cause to doubt until this exact morning.
“The longer this sits unaddressed, the more it calcifies into fact in the public’s mind.”
“Show me the draft.”
He turned his laptop toward me, and I read through three paragraphs of carefully hedged legal language, phrases like “pending further investigation” and “cannot yet confirm the veracity of circulating claims” doing exactly what they were designed to do creating distance, plausible deniability, space between me and Zara that hadn’t existed an hour ago.
“This creates separation,” I said, setting the laptop down harder than I meant to.
“That’s what this is. You’re asking me to publicly hedge on whether my wife is lying.”
“We’re asking you to protect the company’s position until the facts are clear,” Whitcombe said, careful, practiced.
“If it turns out the report has any validity…”
“It doesn’t.”
“With respect, Ethan, you can’t know that with certainty yet. None of us can. The prudent move is to leave room to maneuver until the facts settle.”
Something in me went cold and very still, the particular stillness I recognized from my father right before he ended someone’s employment without raising his voice even slightly.
“You want me to stand in front of cameras and imply my wife might be a liar, based on a document nobody’s verified, leaked by someone we don’t even know yet, in order to protect our stock price.”
“When you put it that way, it sounds…”
“It sounds exactly like what it is.” I stood, and the room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when the person in charge has stopped being reasonable and started being something else entirely.
“You’re fired. Effective immediately. Gerald will handle the transition.”
Whitcombe’s face went through several stages of disbelief in quick succession.
“Ethan, I’ve represented this company for six years. You can’t just…”
“I can, and I am. Get your things together. Security will escort you out within the hour.”
The room stayed dead silent after that, six remaining lawyers exchanging glances that ranged from alarmed to visibly recalculating their own positions on the matter in real time.
“Does anyone else have a draft statement they’d like to read to me that involves distancing myself from my wife?” I asked, looking around the table.
Nobody spoke.
Gerald cleared his throat carefully.
“What did you have in mind?”
“The truth. All of it, as much as I can say publicly without compromising the investigation. I’m not going to stand behind hedged language designed to protect a stock price at the expense of the one person who hasn’t done anything wrong in this entire mess.”
“Ethan, I understand the impulse, but publicly defending her before we’ve verified the report is a risk. If it turns out…”
“It’s not going to turn out to be true, Gerald, because I know it’s not true. I don’t need a lab to confirm what I already believe.”
I heard the words leave my mouth and understood, somewhere underneath the adrenaline and fury carrying me through this morning, that I meant them completely, more completely than I’d expected to mean anything in weeks.
“Zara didn’t lie to me. Someone fabricated this to hurt her, and by extension to hurt me, and I’m not going to hand them the win by pretending otherwise in front of a camera.”
Marcus knocked and let himself in halfway through that sentence, phone in hand.
“Ethan. Reporters are already gathering outside the building. Someone tipped them off that you’d be making a statement.”
“I hadn’t decided to make one yet.”
“Well, apparently someone decided for you.” He held up his phone, a local news alert flashing across the screen: VANCE EXPECTED TO ADDRESS PATERNITY SCANDAL TODAY.
“This is spreading faster than anything I’ve seen. If you don’t say something soon, the silence is going to read as confirmation.”
I looked around the room at the remaining lawyers, at Gerald’s careful, worried expression, at Marcus standing in the doorway with his phone still glowing with the headline that had turned my private life into a public spectacle before I’d even had breakfast.
“Get me five minutes to think,” I said.
“Then set up the podium.”
I found Zara in the sitting room where I’d left her an hour earlier, curled into the corner of the couch with her knees pulled up, phone face-down beside her like she couldn’t stand to look at it anymore either.
She looked up when I came in, something guarded and braced in her expression, like she expected whatever I was about to say to be bad news.
“They’re setting up a press statement,” I said.
“Outside, within the hour.”
“What are you going to say?”
“The truth. That the report is fabricated. That I stand behind you completely.” I crossed the room, sitting down close enough that our knees almost touched.
“I need you to know that I fired the lawyer who suggested I distance myself from you this morning. On the spot. I didn’t even think about it, I just knew I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
Something in her face cracked open at that, relief and disbelief tangled together.
“You believe me.”
“I believe you.” I said it simply, without hedging, because it was simply, uncomplicatedly true, clearer to me now than almost anything else in this entire exhausting month.
“I should have said it more clearly this morning. I was distracted trying to figure out how to respond, and I let that distraction make it look like I was doubting you, and I wasn’t. I’m sorry for that.”
“I do, actually. You’ve spent weeks trying to tell me something, and every time something interrupted you, and this morning I let my own fear interrupt something that should have been simple. You told me it wasn’t real. I should have just believed you the first time, fully, without needing to see the headlines scroll past on your phone first.”
She reached for my hand, gripping it tight.
“What happens now?”
“Now I go out there and tell the truth, publicly, regardless of what it costs the company’s stock price this afternoon. And then we figure out who did this, and we make them answer for it.” I squeezed her hand back.
“Are you okay with me naming you directly? Standing beside you in this? Some people are going to say things about you regardless of what I say up there.”
“They’re already saying things about me regardless. At least this way they’ll hear you say it isn’t true.”
Marcus appeared in the doorway.
“They’re ready for you, Ethan. Whenever you are.”
I stood, and Zara stood with me, and for a moment we just looked at each other, something steadier passing between us than anything either of us had managed to say fully out loud yet.
“I’m coming out there with you,” she said.
“You don’t have to. It might be easier if…”
“I’m coming out there with you,” she repeated, firmer this time, the same stubborn set to her jaw I’d watched face down Cordelia Whitmore and half of Manhattan’s old money without flinching.
“I’m not going to hide inside while you defend me. We do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”
The podium had been set up on the front steps of the building, a small crowd of reporters already gathered, cameras and microphones bristling in a dense cluster at the base of the stairs.
I caught sight of Victor near the edge of the assembled crowd, standing slightly apart from the reporters, watching with an expression of careful, patient interest that made my skin crawl the moment I registered it.
I stepped up to the podium with Zara beside me, her hand steady in mine despite everything, and the questions started immediately, overlapping, urgent, a wall of noise I let wash past me until it settled enough for me to speak.
“I have a brief statement,” I said, and the noise dropped away almost instantly, every camera angling toward me at once.
“This morning, a fabricated document began circulating online, claiming to be a paternity test result.
“That document is false. No such test was ever conducted, because there was never any question in my mind that required one.”
A ripple went through the assembled reporters, questions half-forming before I raised a hand to continue.
“I don’t know yet who created that document, or why, though I intend to find out, and when I do, there will be consequences.”
I glanced sideways at Zara, feeling something steady itself in my chest at the sight of her standing there, unflinching, meeting the cameras head-on rather than shrinking from them.
“What I do know is that my wife has done nothing wrong. She has weathered weeks of scrutiny, gossip, and now outright fabrication with more grace than most people in this city could manage, and I am done standing by while people who’ve never met her build a narrative designed to hurt her.”
I stepped in front of the cameras and said, “Zara is my wife, and anyone coming after her comes through me first,” and somewhere behind me, I heard Victor Ashford stop smiling.