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“I hate him,” I mutter. And somehow, that feels like the biggest lie I’ve told myself. And the opposite of that has started to feel true.

Chapter Twenty

DALTON

By noon, Maggie Hanes’ name is everywhere.

Not hinted at. Not protected behind careful language. Not buried under the mercy of anonymity. Everywhere.

Her name is in headlines, on gossip accounts, beneath blurry photographs and shameless captions. Her face is frozen mid-step outside Alester Chandler’s estate, caught from a cruel angle by someone hiding behind a camera lens. Her student ID photo has somehow appeared on a forum thread, enlarged and picked apart by strangers who have never heard her laugh, never seen her panic over anatomy notes, never watched her pretend she’s fine when her hands are trembling.

Maggie Hanes Confirmed as Mother Of Alaster Chandler’s Heir

Medical Student Carrying Billionaire’s Child After Private Fertility Arrangement

Who Is Maggie Hanes?

Inside the Life of the Young Woman at the Center of the Chandler Baby Scandal

I sit in my office at the clinic with my phone in one hand and my coffee going cold beside a stack of patient charts I have read three times without absorbing a word.

Alester did this. He stood in a room full of investors, relatives, board members, and press-adjacent parasites, and announced her like she was a business acquisition.

Now every outlet has her name. Every account wants her story. Every stranger with an internet connection thinks they have the right to discuss her face, her body, her fertility, her motives, and the child growing inside her.

I scroll down, jaw tight.

There’s a photograph from the party. Maggie stands beside Alester in a pale dress, her smile too bright and too fixed, the kind of smile people wear when they’re trying not to fall apart. Petra stands just behind her, watchful as ever. Alester looks composed, pleased, untouchable.

Maggie looks like prey someone has dressed for a banquet.

My thumb hovers over the image.

Another article has found her university. Another has found her age. One has a photo of her outside the clinic, hand lifted toward her face as if she’s trying to shield herself from a flash that has already stolen what it wanted.

By the third article, I’m no longer pretending this is only professional concern.

I’m furious.

My thumb hovers over a blurred photograph attached to one of the posts. It’s taken outside Alester’s house, probably from a car across the street.

Except I can still tell it’s her. A flash of brown hair. One hand near her stomach. Petra beside her, stiff and efficient as ever, guiding her through the gate.

Maggie looks small. That’s what gets me.

Not weak. She has never seemed weak to me, not even when she’s flustered, not even when she’s trying to hide panic behind a joke about orange juice tasting like ass. But here, in the photograph, surrounded by iron gates and headlines and the monstrous machinery of Alester Moreau’s life, she looks painfully young.

I lock the phone and set it face down on the desk.

It doesn’t help. The headlines remain behind my eyes.

I shouldn’t care this much.

That’s the lie I’ve been telling myself since the morning the news broke. I’m her physician now. Concern is reasonable. Professional. Expected. She’s pregnant, under stress, and suddenly attached to a public scandal involving one of the wealthiest men in the country. Worrying about her health is not a betrayal of common sense.

But that’s not the whole truth, and I’m tired enough to admit it.

I’m worried because it’s Maggie.