Chapter 6: The Scholar in the Mirror
"Marriage?" I choked out, stepping back until my legs hit the frame of the bed. "Ethan, are you insane? You can't just announce a marriage to fix a PR crisis!"
Arthur Vance quietly excused himself, closing the heavy oak door behind him, leaving us alone in the soft glow of the bedside lamps while Lily continued pushing her train across the rug, oblivious to the storm brewing above her head.
"It isn't a PR fix, Rosa," Ethan said, taking a step toward me, his hands raised in surrender. "I don't give a damn about the press. I don't give a damn about Richard Haynes' stock options."
"Then why say it?" My voice broke, four years of suppressed anger, hurt, and exhaustion finally pouring out of me like a broken dam. "You think you can just write a check, put your name on a birth certificate, and ask me to marry you after you ghosted me four years ago? After you left me to give birth alone in a public hospital while you were sipping champagne with Victoria Haynes?"
Ethan flinched as if I had struck him across the face. The color drained from his cheeks, his shoulders sagging under the weight of my words.
"I know," he whispered, his voice trembling violently. "I know I don't deserve your forgiveness, Rosa. I know I was a coward. When my father told me he would pull the funding for your Columbia grant if I didn't break things off with you, I thought... God help me, I thought I was protecting your future."
I froze, my breath catching in my throat. "What did you just say?"
Ethan looked up, tears brimming in his eyes. "My father found out about us four years ago. He knew you were working catering gigs to pay your rent while finishing your PhD. He told me that if I kept seeing a 'nobody' from Queens, he would use his influence on the university board to revoke your fellowship and blackball your research."
The air left my lungs in a cold, painful rush.
The anonymous donor grant.
All these years, I had believed Ethan had paid off the university to buy my silence. I had believed he wanted to erase me.
"I thought if I walked away quietly," Ethan continued, his voice barely audible over the hum of the heater, "you would finish your doctorate, get your degree, and never have to worry about rent again. I didn't know you were pregnant, Rosa. If I had known... I swear on my mother's memory, I would have burned my father's company to the ground four years ago."
I sank down onto the edge of the bed, my hands covering my face as tears spilled over my fingers. The resentment that had sustained me through three years of late-night shifts, cold apartments, and floor-scrubbing suddenly dissolved, leaving behind a hollow, aching grief for the time we had lost.
Ethan dropped to his knees in front of me, taking my trembling hands in his, pressing his forehead against my knees.
"I'm not asking you to marry me for the company, Rosa," he wept silently. "I'm asking for a chance to earn back the right to be in your life. I want to build the home we were supposed to have. I want to give Lily the world."
I looked down at his dark head resting against my knees, then across the room at our daughter, who was holding Button the rabbit up to the window, watching the rain hit the glass.
"We're going to fight them, Ethan," I said softly, my voice finding a steady, unshakeable strength I hadn't felt in four years. "Richard Haynes thinks I'm just a maid he can intimidate. He forgot that before I wore this uniform... I was a scientist."
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Ethan looked up, a fierce, brilliant smile breaking through his tears.
The war with the Haynes family had just begun. But for the first time in four years, we were fighting it together.
