In that hospital bed, holding Iris, I finally stopped translating.
There was nothing underneath the armor. The armor was the man.
Because I need you to understand who Carson is, and who his family is, to understand why this accusation was not a moment of insecurity.
The Rutherfords are old money and older pride. Carson’s late father, Reginald, ran the family like a dynasty, and the thing the Rutherfords worship above God and money both is bl*odline. Whose child you are. Whose bl*od you carry. Carson had grown up being told that the Rutherford name was a sacred thing passed through the bl*od, that a Rutherford’s first duty was to protect the line.
He did not ask for a DNA test because he had evidence.
He asked because somewhere in his family-poisoned head, our daughter was not a baby. She was a question of lineage. A matter of whose bl*od. And he would rather interrogate his exhausted wife thirty minutes after childbirth than risk the Rutherford name touching a child that might not be “pure.”
