“I’m calling her now. If she doesn’t take it down, the wedding is over.”

I closed my eyes.

Not because I cared about the wedding anymore.

Because I could hear the finality in his voice.

When Ethan made a decision like that, it tended to cut through everything in its path.

He came over two hours later looking like a man whose life had just caught fire in a room full of people.

He asked if I had replied to Victoria. I said no.

Then his phone lit up with her name, and he took the call on my tiny balcony with the glass door shut.

I couldn’t hear every word, but I heard enough.

“No.”

“Take it down.”

“I don’t care what you meant.”

“My son is not your damage control.”

That last line hit me like something physical.

He came back inside with his face gone flat and cold.

“She says she was venting.”

I looked at him. “By smearing the mother of your child.”

His jaw flexed. “The post is coming down.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

His eyes moved to the bassinet. Leo slept through all of it, one cheek pressed against the sheet, unaware that adults were trying to drag him into their pride.

Then Ethan said, in a tone I had never heard from him before, “No one touches my son.”

It wasn’t tender.

It wasn’t warm.

It was territorial, yes—but not in the way his mother had meant it.

More like a line carved in stone.

That evening, the post disappeared.

At 9:07 p.m., he texted me three words.

Wedding is off.

I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I set the phone facedown and went back to logging Leo’s feed schedule.

Because dramatic sentences don’t wash bottles or take temperatures.

The next morning, Ethan showed up early carrying a small paper bag from a pharmacy.

Inside were practical things: infant-safe sanitizer, diaper cream, saline drops.

No flowers. No grand speech.

Just the right items.

“Did he sleep?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He washed his hands and waited.

I handed him the baby.

He held Leo more steadily this time, and when our son made a soft mewling sound, Ethan instinctively shifted him higher against his chest the exact way I did.

I noticed.

Then his phone rang.

He glanced at the screen and exhaled. “My mother.”

He answered and put it on speaker before I could object.

Carol’s voice came through sharp enough to cut cloth.

“What have you done?”

“I ended it.”

“For her?” she demanded. “For that woman and her baby?”

I stood very still.

Ethan’s hand tightened around the bottle of sanitizer on the table.