Chapter 4: Someone Used My Name

"Paternity," Amelia repeated, the word landing strange in her mouth. "For whose child?"

"That's what I intend to find out," Ethan said, and for the first time since she'd woken up in this life, his coldness wasn't aimed at her. It had turned outward, toward whoever had used his wife's name like a weapon. "The clinic wouldn't release the requesting party's details over the phone. I have someone driving over there now."

Margaret had gone very quiet, her earlier composure replaced by something brittle, her cream gloved hands pressed flat against the marble counter like she needed it to stay upright.

"Margaret," Ethan said, noticing. "You look ill. Sit down."

"I'm fine," Margaret said, too quickly. "I should go. I have a luncheon."

"You just said you came to talk to me."

"It can wait." She was already moving toward the door, and Amelia watched her go with the growing certainty that Margaret Whitmore knew exactly whose paternity test this was, and was far more frightened of the answer than anyone in that kitchen realized.

"Rosa," Amelia said quietly, once Margaret's heels had clicked out of earshot, "can you take Noah to the playroom for a bit?"

Noah, halfway through his fourth cookie, looked between the adults with the sharp instincts of a child who'd learned to read a room for danger long before he'd learned to read words. He didn't argue. He just slid off his stool, tucked his triceratops under one arm, and let Rosa lead him out without complaint though he glanced back once at Amelia like he was checking she'd still be there when he returned.

I will be, she thought, surprising herself with how much she meant it.

When they were alone, Ethan turned back to her, arms crossed, studying her with an expression she couldn't quite place not trust, not yet, but something adjacent to curiosity.

"You didn't defend yourself," he said. "Just now. When I told you about the test. Most people would have sworn up and down it wasn't them."

"I already told you it wasn't mine. I'm not going to keep saying it just to make you feel better about believing me."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but its ghost. "That's new."

"A lot of things are new," Amelia muttered, more to herself than to him.

He studied her a beat longer, then reached into his jacket and pulled out his phone, scrolling until he found what he was looking for. He turned the screen toward her.

It was a photo old, a few years by the look of the hairstyles of three people standing on a yacht deck. A younger Ethan, unsmiling even then. A striking dark-haired woman with a proprietary hand on his arm, laughing at something outside the frame. And beside them, half-turned away from the camera, a man Amelia didn't recognize, but who had a familiar set to his jaw.

"That's Vanessa," Ethan said, tapping the dark-haired woman. "And that's her brother, Jason Kensington." His finger moved to the third figure. "He manages half her financial holdings. If someone wanted to fake a paternity claim quietly using my wife's insurance, my wife's name Jason would know exactly how to make it disappear from every system that mattered."

"You think Vanessa and her brother did this? Why would they want people to think you and I had a child with someone else's DNA?"

"Because a paternity scandal would be enough to end this marriage without a single lie needing to hold up in court," Ethan said grimly. "The tabloids don't need proof. They need a headline. Whitmore Heir's Secret Child. By the time the truth came out, the damage would already be done to me, to the company stock, to Noah's custody arrangement in the divorce you apparently already started."

Amelia's stomach turned over. "So this isn't about me at all. It's about getting you back. Clearing the path."

"That would be my guess." Ethan's jaw tightened. "Vanessa doesn't lose gracefully. She never has."

"Then why is Margaret so afraid of the Bennett name? What does she know that we don't?"

Ethan's eyes sharpened on her, like he'd forgotten, for a moment, that she'd been the one to say that name first the one his mother had reacted to like she'd been struck.

"That's what I'd like to know myself," he said slowly. "My mother doesn't scare easily, Amelia. In thirty-two years, I've seen her rattled exactly twice. Both times, it had something to do with a woman named Eleanor Bennett."

"Who's that?"

"Daniel Bennett's late wife. The founder of Bennett Empire's actual fortune, if the old rumors are true my mother's closest friend, once, before some falling-out neither of them ever explained. Eleanor died when I was a teenager. Car accident." He paused, something calculating settling over his features. "The timing always struck me as strange. She died six months before you"

He stopped himself.

"Before I what?" Amelia pressed.

Ethan's eyes met hers, and for the first time, there was no anger in them at all just a wary, dawning uncertainty, like a man realizing the ground beneath a familiar house had quietly shifted without his noticing.

"Before you showed up in my life," he said. "Twenty-three years old, no family anyone could ever verify, engaged to my business partner's son within six months of arriving in Manhattan. I never thought about it before. I had no reason to." His gaze dropped to the day planner still sitting on the counter where Amelia had left it, the folded hospital paper tucked visibly between its pages. "But if that record in your hand is real, Amelia if you really are connected to the Bennetts somehow then everyone in this family has been lying to both of us for years."

Before Amelia could answer, his phone buzzed in his hand the driver, calling back from the clinic.

Ethan answered, listened for three seconds, and went pale in a way Amelia had not yet seen on his face.

"Say that again," he said quietly.

He lowered the phone slowly, staring at Amelia like he was seeing her really, seeing her for the first time since she'd woken up.

"The paternity test wasn't ordered for a stranger's baby," he said. "It was ordered using your name to test your DNA. Against Eleanor Bennett's."