Ethan's POV
I've interviewed enough public figures to know within the first ten minutes whether someone is performing for me or actually talking to me. Vivian Ashford, against every instinct I walked in with, is doing the second thing.
She'd started the afternoon exactly as I expected. Poised. Guarded. She'd answered my questions with the polish of someone who'd been media-trained within an inch of her life, every phrase pressed and folded like the silk blouse she wore, not a single wrinkle out of place. But somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, something in her loosened, almost imperceptibly, like a knot finally giving way under its own weight.
"He used to memorize the specific way I take my coffee," she says, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, a small, private smile breaking t
