His Sons Girl

The Photos

The security footage took less than ten minutes to pull, and by the time Julian’s head of communications arrived at the office at nearly ten at night, pale and grim-faced in yesterday’s clothes, I already knew exactly what we were going to see before anyone said it out loud.

“Drone,” said Marcus, the communications chief, turning his laptop around to show us a grainy but unmistakable image — Julian and me on the terrace, his hand on my face, the kiss that had felt, twelve hours ago, like the single most private moment of my entire life. “High-end consumer model, the kind paparazzi use for exactly this. Whoever flew it either got lucky finding your address or already knew where to look.”

“Already knew,” Julian said grimly. “Nobody stumbles onto a private terrace forty floors up by accident. Someone gave them the location.”

The implication sat in the room like a held breath, and I watched Julian’s face cycle through several possibilities before landing, visibly, on the one he clearly didn’t want to say out loud.

“You don’t think Ethan—”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.” He rubbed both hands over his face, exhaustion finally cracking all the way through the composure he’d been holding since the moment I’d walked in. “He knew where I live. He was angry enough last night to threaten the board directly. I don’t want to believe my son would sell a photo of his father to a tabloid, but I also didn’t think, forty-eight hours ago, that any of the rest of this was possible either.”

Marcus cleared his throat, the careful diplomacy of a man used to delivering worse news than this. “Regardless of the source, the story runs at six a.m. regardless of what we do tonight. The only real decision in front of you is whether you get ahead of it with a statement or let the paper’s framing stand unchallenged.” He glanced at me, apologetic but direct. “I need to say this plainly, because it’s my job to. Whatever statement we release is going to include Ms. Chen’s name. There’s no version of tomorrow’s coverage where it doesn’t.”

I felt the full weight of that land somewhere low in my stomach — not surprise, exactly, Julian had already warned me the night would go public, but there was a difference between an abstract warning and watching a man discuss, in clinical detail, exactly how my name was about to appear in print beside a photo I hadn’t consented to having taken.

“Give us a minute,” Julian said, and Marcus stepped out without argument, leaving the two of us alone in an office that suddenly felt very small.

“You don’t have to do the statement with me in it,” I said. “You could distance this. Say it’s a personal matter, keep my name out of the official language, let the story run its course without—”

“No.” He said it immediately, firmly, crossing the room to stand in front of me. “I am not going to hide you to make this easier for me, Harper. Not after everything it’s already cost to stop hiding at all. If my name is in that story, yours is too, and we face it together or we don’t face it at all.”

“And if the board uses this to push you out anyway? If Ethan really did leak it, if this is exactly the kind of exposure Vivian warned us about—”

“Then I lose the fight I should have been braver about a year ago, and we find out what’s left standing after.” His hands found my face, steady despite everything, his thumbs brushing along my jaw with a tenderness that felt almost unbearable given the chaos surrounding it. “I am done letting fear of exactly this moment dictate what I’m willing to admit to. I did that with Marissa for twenty years. I’m not doing it with you.”

My phone buzzed in my bag, and some instinct made me check it despite everything happening in the room — a single text from a number I hadn’t saved, the area code matching the one I’d started, unwillingly, to associate with disaster.

Ethan. It wasn’t me. I know you probably think it was, and I understand why, but I need you both to know I didn’t do this. I have my own reasons for hating what’s about to happen to you tomorrow, and none of them involve wanting it to happen this way.

I read it twice and handed the phone to Julian without a word. I watched something in his face shift as he read it — not quite relief, something more complicated, guilt layered over grief layered over a father’s instinctive need to believe the best of his son even after everything.

“If it wasn’t Ethan,” I said slowly, “then who knew to be watching that terrace at exactly the right moment?”

Julian’s jaw tightened, and when he looked up from the phone, something cold and calculating had replaced the exhaustion in his eyes — the version of him I imagined showed up in boardrooms, the version that had built an empire out of reading exactly the threats other people missed.

“There’s only one person with both the motive and the access to know I’d be on that terrace last night,” he said quietly. “And it isn’t my son.”

“Who, then?”

He was already reaching for his phone, dialing before he’d fully answered me, his voice dropping into something hard and controlled that I’d never once heard him use. “Vivian. I need you to pull board attendance records for tonight’s emergency session request. I need to know exactly which member called for it, and I need to know precisely when.”

He hung up and looked at me, something grim and certain settling into his expression.

“The board member trying to take my seat,” he said. “The same one who called the emergency session. I think we’re about to find out just how far he was willing to go to get it.”