The Loser Programmer Husband is a Quadrillionaire

Chapter 8

Five minutes after Clara's footsteps faded down the hallway, the door to Ethan's ward opened again. This time, the woman who stepped through carried herself like she owned every room she walked into.

Tall, sharp featured, dressed in a tailored black coat that made her look like she had stepped straight out of a boardroom or a battlefield. Her eyes swept the room once before landing on Ethan, and something behind them cracked.

Ethan looked up at her, and the wall he had been holding together for two days finally gave out. His chin dropped, his jaw trembled, and for the first time since waking up in this hospital bed, his eyes burned with something he had been refusing to let out.

Lena crossed the room in three long strides and sat on the edge of the bed, taking his hand gently between both of hers. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was steady, the kind of grip that said she was not going anywhere.

"Look at you," she whispered, her eyes rimming red as she studied his face, the bruises on his temple, the hollowness in his cheeks, the dead weight of his legs beneath the blanket. "Look at what she's done to you."

"Lena," Ethan started, but his voice broke before he could finish.

"Don't." Lena squeezed his hand tighter. "Don't make excuses for her. Not to me."

Ethan closed his mouth and stared down at their intertwined fingers. He hadn't seen Lena in over a year, but looking at her now felt like stepping back into the only safe place he had ever known.

They had grown up together in the same orphanage on the east side of the city. Two kids with no last names and no futures, sharing the same cold hallways and the same watered down soup every night.

 When Ethan was twelve, Lena had fallen into the river behind the orphanage during a storm, and he had jumped in after her without thinking. He nearly drowned pulling her to shore, and after that night, they became inseparable. She was the closest thing to family he had ever had.

Then one day, a car pulled up to the orphanage gates, and two strangers in expensive clothes walked out asking for a girl matching Lena's description. 

Her biological parents. Wealthy beyond anything either of them could have imagined. They took her away that same afternoon, and Ethan stood at the window watching the car disappear until there was nothing left to watch.

Years later, after Ethan met Clara and started building a life with her, Lena found him again. She had come back for him, ready to bring him into her world, but by then it was too late. He was already in love with someone else, and Lena had no choice but to step aside.

She had never stopped watching over him. Not once.

"I told you back then," Lena said, her voice low and tight with anger she was barely holding in check. "I told you that woman wasn't good enough for you. When you said you loved her, I kept my mouth shut because I respected your choice. But this?" She gestured toward his legs, toward the hospital room, toward everything this place represented. "This is where your choice brought you, Ethan. Lying in a hospital bed with a broken spine while she runs off to have dinner with the man who put you here."

Ethan flinched. "You know about John?"

"I know everything." Lena's eyes went ice cold. "I had people looking into it the moment you called me last night. John Carvesh. Heir to the Carvesh Syndicate. And your dear wife is sitting across from him right now, signing business deals while you rot in this bed." Her voice shook with barely contained fury. "Divorce her. Right now. Today."

Ethan turned his face toward the window. The sunlight fell across his lap in pale, thin stripes, and he stared at them for a long time without speaking.

"Ethan." Lena's voice softened, but the steel underneath it remained. "What are you still holding onto?"

He didn't answer. Not because he didn't want to, but because he genuinely didn't know anymore. There had been a time when Clara's name was the only thing that made the world feel solid under his feet. She was his wife. 

The mother of his child. The woman he had given everything to without ever being asked. Walking away from that meant admitting that every single year of his life since their wedding had been built on a lie, and some part of him, bruised and bleeding and barely conscious, was still not ready to accept that.

"I just need to be sure," he said quietly. "I need to know for certain before I make a decision I can't take back."

Lena looked at him with eyes full of sadness, the kind of sadness that came from loving someone who kept choosing the wrong person over and over again. She opened her mouth to say something else, but before she could, Ethan's phone buzzed on the side table.

He picked it up. The caller ID showed the hospital's laboratory department.

"Mr. Morrison?" The voice on the other end was brisk and professional. "This is the genetics lab. We're calling to inform you that your paternity test results are ready for pickup."

Ethan's heart stopped for a full second. "I'll be there."

He hung up and looked at Lena, something raw and desperate flickering behind his eyes. "I need you to take me downstairs. The results are ready."

Lena didn't ask what results. She didn't ask any questions at all. She simply stood, pulled the wheelchair from the corner of the room, and helped him into it with careful, practiced movements, her hands gentle but firm against his back.

She wheeled him down the hallway in silence, into the elevator, and through the lobby to the laboratory wing on the ground floor.

 The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the smell of antiseptic hung thick in the air. A nurse behind the desk handed Ethan a sealed envelope after checking his ID, and he held it in both hands like it was a loaded gun.

Lena stood behind the wheelchair, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder, waiting.

Ethan tore the envelope open. His eyes moved across the page, scanning past the medical jargon, past the charts and the reference numbers, until they landed on the conclusion at the bottom.

Three lines of text. Black ink on white paper.

Probability of paternity: 0.00%. The alleged father is excluded as the biological father of the tested child.

The paper trembled in his hands. His vision blurred, and for a moment the entire hallway seemed to tilt sideways around him.

He read it again. And again. And one more time after that, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less devastating if he just looked hard enough.

They didn't.

His daughter. The little girl whose first steps he had watched from behind a camera. The little girl who fell asleep every night with her head on his chest. The little girl who called him daddy with a voice that could make even the worst day feel like it mattered.

She was not his.

She had never been his.

Lena leaned over his shoulder and read the report in silence. Her grip on his shoulder tightened, but she said nothing, giving him the space to break however he needed to.

Ethan sat perfectly still in the wheelchair for a long time. The paper rested in his lap, and he stared straight ahead at nothing, his face completely empty, like every emotion he had left had been drained out of him through a hole he couldn't find.

Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face. It was the saddest smile Lena had ever seen in her life, thin and hollow and carrying the weight of five wasted years behind it.

"Well," Ethan said, his voice light and almost cheerful in a way that made Lena's chest ache. "I guess there's nothing left to hesitate about now, is there?"

Lena's hand moved from his shoulder to the side of his face, turning him gently to look at her. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady. "Tell me what you need."

Ethan folded the report carefully, once, twice, three times, and tucked it into his shirt pocket like a man putting away the last letter from a dead friend.

"Find me the best lawyer in this city," he said quietly, his eyes clear for the first time in days. "I want a divorce agreement drafted by tomorrow morning. Every clause airtight. Every exit sealed." He paused and looked up at her. "I'm leaving that woman for good."