Chapter 176

Ethan's POV 

I heard the air leave Sophia’s lungs as she dropped to her knees, the sound like a twig snapping underfoot. “What…” she managed to whisper, voice thin and ragged, each breath a fight. Her hands trembled against her thighs; the panic in her chest was almost visible.

“How can that be possible?” she asked again, as if asking would force an explanation into being.

That was the thing: no explanation made sense. Nothing fit the neat, controllable pattern I’d always worked so hard to build around myself. Today felt cursed, a day when every single rotten thing in my life unspooled at once. The news, the investors, the humiliation, it all arrived on my doorstep like a mob with torches, and the one person lighting the match was a woman who had once been smaller than an afterthought in my life.

I moved through rehearsed outrage, the kind of anger I’d perfected over years of negotiation and public relations: loud, immediate, designed to