Page 153 of Secret Heir For The Billionaire Twin

“You had no right.”

“I had every right,” Grace replies. “Those notes belong to the publication.”

I stand there for another second, looking at the woman I have worked for and trusted, and realize there is nothing I can say that will make her understand the line she crossed. I turn without another word and leave her office.

Inside my own office, I close the door, lock it, and lower myself into the chair behind my desk. The first sob catches me before I can stop it, and I cover my face with both hands as everything I have been holding together finally breaks loose.

My phone vibrates repeatedly on the desk. Maya’s name appears once, then again, followed by another message a few minutes later. I cannot answer her yet.

I stay there for hours with the blinds closed while the article spreads across every screen outside my office and my name sits buried beneath it, attached to something I never agreed to write.

***

Over the next few days, the story gets worse. Every morning brings another headline about Blackwell Technologies, another analyst predicting what the investigation could mean, and another photograph of Julian or Adrian entering the New York offices beneath a crush of cameras. Kate’s article is quoted repeatedly, its most inflammatory lines lifted into television segments and social media threads until the original context has almost disappeared entirely.

I stop watching after the second day, but the story follows me anyway through my phone, my laptop, and every email alert I have forgotten to disable. My name is not in the headline, but it is still there beneath the article, attached to the reporting credits where anyone looking closely enough can find it. Julian will have found it, and that certainty hurts more than I know what to do with.

I try calling him once more from my apartment, but the call never reaches him. After what happened with Daniel, I cannot bring myself to call the office again. I could keep trying, send an email, leave messages with PR, or force some other route through the wall Blackwell has built around itself, but every option creates another possibility I cannot control.

If Julian already believes I participated in the article, another call from me may look like damage control. If his lawyers are monitoring communications, anything I say could become part of the investigation. If someone inside Blackwell decides I used my relationship with him to gain access, then every private conversation we had could be dragged into public view. Now there is something else to protect, and that changes every calculation I make.

I sit on the edge of my bed with one hand resting over my stomach, trying to understand how something still so small can already determine so much. If the press discovers I am pregnant with Julian Blackwell’s child, there will be no privacy left. They will count backward through Boston, Italy, every hotel, every interview, and every photograph of us entering or leaving the same building until they have constructed a story neither of us ever agreed to give them. They will turn my child into evidence before it is even born.

The thought makes me physically ill.

I want Julian to know, and that is the part that keeps breaking me. He deserves to know, and some part of me still wants nothing more than to hear his voice and tell him that I had nothing to do with what Grace and Kate published. I want to tell him about the doctor. I want to tell him I am terrified. I want him to tell me that whatever is happening around us does not erase what happened between us.

But wanting those things does not make reaching for them safe.

I have spent my entire career thinking through consequences before I move, and I cannot stop doing that simply because this consequence is mine. By the end of the week, I stop trying to reach him, not because he has not called me and not because I believe what happened between us meant nothing, but because every path toward him now runs directly through the biggest scandal in the country. I refuse to place my child in the middle of it before I understand what I am walking into.

The decision feels like tearing something out of myself, but it is still a decision I make on my own.

On Monday morning, I return to the office before most of the newsroom arrives and sit behind my desk for nearly twenty minutes before opening a blank document. The resignation letter is shorter than I expect. I do not accuse Grace of anything. I do not mention Kate. I do not explain Julian or the pregnancy or why I cannot remain at a publication that took reporting gathered in trust and transformed it into something I had explicitly refused to write. I simply state that I am resigning effective immediately.

When I finish, I print the letter, sign my name, and carry it to Grace’s office. She looks up when I enter, surprise flickering across her face.

“You’re here early,” Grace says.

I place the letter on her desk.

“I’m resigning.”

Grace’s eyes drop to the page before returning to mine.

“You’re quitting over the Blackwell piece?”

“I’m leaving because I no longer trust what happens to my work once I hand it over,” I tell her.

Her expression hardens.

“You know that isn’t fair.”

“I know exactly what happened.”

“You were refusing an assignment,” Grace says.

“I was refusing to distort one.”