After His Mistress Claimed My AI Husband’s Baby

The red pen was still in my hand when the door slammed open.

I didn't hear a knock. I never do anymore, not from students who think office hours are optional and rules are for other people. But this wasn't a student coming to argue about a grade. This was Kinslee Cole.

She stood in my doorway with one hand pressed to her stomach, round and high under a soft gray cardigan. Her hands were shaking. I noticed that first, the way you notice a hairline crack before you notice the whole window is about to go. Three years ago I'd held those hands in a rented car outside a trailer in West Virginia and told her she never had to be afraid again. I remembered exactly how small they'd felt then.

They didn't look small now. They looked staged.

"Kinslee." I set the pen down. My planner was still open to Tuesday, color-coded in greens and blues, ordinary as a grocery list. "What is this?"

She didn't answer me. She looked past my shoulder, toward the hallway, like she was waiting for a cue.

That's when I saw the rest of them.

Brycen Cole filled the doorway behind her, all shoulders and gold chains that caught the fluorescent light too well to be real. I'd met him twice before, both times with his hand out. He didn't step into the room. He planted himself in the frame instead, arms crossed, like he was guarding an exit nobody had asked to use.

And beside him — a ring light. A phone on a little metal rig, already glowing red at the corner. A woman with a headset and a smile that had nothing to do with her eyes.

"You guys," she said, not to me, not to anyone in the room at all, "I cannot believe what I'm about to show you."

I didn't know her name yet. I would learn it soon enough — Ember Lewis — but in that first second she was just a stranger narrating my office like it was a nature documentary.

"Kinslee." I kept my voice level. I've found that panic is contagious, but so is calm, if you're patient enough to spread it first. "Whatever this is, we can talk. Just us."

That was when she started crying.

It came on fast, and it came on loud, tears sliding down exactly on cue, her voice cracking at the precise moment it would land hardest. "He raped me," she said. "Maximilian. Your husband. He got me pregnant and then he just — he threw me away like I was nothing."

The room went very quiet, except for the small, tinny sound of Ember's phone picking up every word.

"He's rich," Brycen said, stepping forward now that the camera had something to frame. "He's got two hotels behind him. Y'all think you can just use people and walk away? We want a settlement. Seven figures. Or we go to the police, and then to every news station in this city."

My phone, face-down on the desk, started buzzing. Once. Then again. Then it didn't stop.

I didn't look at it yet. I already knew what it would say, because I could hear Ember's viewer count climbing in real time, could hear her breathe the number out loud like a prayer. Fifty thousand. I would learn later it hit that number in under four minutes.

By the time I did look, my screen was a wall of notifications. Strangers. Comments. Messages that used words like *monster* and *disgusting* and worse, words meant for me, a woman they had never met, based on nothing but a stranger's tears on a livestream.

Outside my window, students had started to gather, phones raised, faces lit with that particular hunger people get when something terrible is happening to someone else.

And then Nelson Grant arrived, out of breath, his tie slightly crooked, his phone already in his hand.

"Hope." He pulled me by the elbow toward the corner of the room, dropping his voice like that would make it private. It wasn't. Nothing in that room was private anymore. "We need to handle this quietly. For the good of all parties." He glanced at his screen. "The mentions are already—Hope, I really think you should consider some kind of settlement. Just to make it go away."

"No."

Just the one word. I didn't raise my voice. I never do.

He blinked at me like I'd slapped him.

I turned back around, toward Kinslee's tears, toward Brycen's crossed arms, toward the small red light blinking steady on Ember's phone, broadcasting my face to fifty thousand strangers who had already decided who I was.

I folded my hands on the desk, the way I do before an exam I already know the answers to, and I looked directly into the camera.