Chapter 5 - Ethan’s Counterattack
Within an hour of the thugs leaving her bakery, Clara’s phone started ringing incessantly.
She ignored the first five calls from unknown numbers. Then a familiar, frantic number flashed across her screen.
Ethan.
She swiped the answer button before it could ring a second time, her anger boiling over.
“If you sent those corporate goons to my shop, Ethan, I swear to God I will—”
“Clara! Clara, stop, listen to me!” Ethan’s voice cut through the phone line, sounding breathless, panicked, and furious. “I didn't send anyone! I just found out twenty minutes ago!”
Clara froze, her hand gripping the phone so hard her fingers ached. “What are you talking about?”
“My father’s head of security—a bastard named Miller—pulled medical access logs from a private clearinghouse database yesterday. They found the ultrasound records from your clinic visit downtown,” Ethan rushed out, the words tumbling over each other in a desperate torrent. “My father called an emergency board meeting for tomorrow morning. He’s planning to file an emergency petition for prenatal custody and grandparent rights in Probate Court, claiming you’re an unstable, unfit single mother trying to alienate the heirs from the Whitmore dynasty.”
The blood drained entirely from Clara’s face. The room seemed to tilt sideways.
“Prenatal... custody?” Clara choked out, the horror of the phrase chilling her to the bone. “They can’t do that! The babies aren't even born yet!”
“In Massachusetts, with enough money and a corrupt family court judge in their pocket, the Whitmores can do almost anything,” Ethan said, his voice trembling with a dark, suppressed rage. “Unless we stop them.”
“We?” Clara asked bitterly. “There is no we, Ethan.”
“Clara, they are my children too!” Ethan shouted over the phone, the raw pain in his voice cutting through her defenses. “Do you think I would ever let my father touch them? Do you think I would let him turn my children into cold, heartless corporate trophies the way he tried to do to me?”
Clara closed her eyes, tears spilling over her eyelashes as she rested her forehead against the cool glass of the office window.
“He’s your father, Ethan,” she whispered. “He’s a monster with bottomless pockets.”
“Then I’ll fight him with bottomless pockets,” Ethan declared fiercely. “I spent the last two months liquidating my personal trust fund, selling off my shares in the shipping terminals, and moving every asset I own into an independent blind trust managed by a pit bull of a family lawyer in Boston. I am completely legally independent of him. And tomorrow morning, at the Whitmore Holdings quarterly board meeting, I’m going to declare war on him in front of every shareholder and journalist in the city.”
Clara opened her eyes. “What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to strip him of his chairmanship,” Ethan said coldly. “And then I’m coming to Cambridge to protect my family. Just... please, Clara. Lock the doors. Don't let anyone into the bakery tonight. I’m sending two private security guards I trust with my life to sit outside your apartment. Just trust me one last time.”
The line went dead with a click.
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Clara stood in her small office, staring at the dead phone screen.
The battle lines had been drawn. The Whitmore dynasty was about to tear itself apart from the inside out—and she and her unborn twins were sitting directly in the eye of the storm.
