The Star Makers Mad Wife Chapter 2

Under Stella’s relentless questioning, I finally sat down and told her the story of Ethan and me.

When I first met Ethan Vance, he wasn’t some celebrated boy genius. He was just the problem child from down the street, the weird, quiet kid everyone in the neighborhood whispered about. No friends, no family to speak of. His parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce and treated him like a piece of luggage they were both trying to lose.

The winters in Boston are bone-deep cold. I found him one evening huddled in the stairwell of our apartment building, shivering in a threadbare sweatshirt. He looked so lost. I couldn't just leave him there, so I brought him home.

One day, while we were all playing a board game, my father noticed something incredible about the way Ethan’s mind worked with numbers. It was a flash of lightning. From that day on, everything changed.

My dad saw a spark in him that no one else had, and he fanned it into a flame. At ten, Ethan won the National Math Olympiad. At fourteen, he got early admission to MIT. By sixteen, a paper he published was making waves across the globe, and awards started piling up.

Suddenly, the same parents who couldn’t get rid of him fast enough were fighting tooth and nail for custody.

But Ethan did something none of them expected. He knelt before my father and bowed his head, a gesture so formal and final it silenced the room.

“I know who was good to me,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I know who really loves me. From now on, you and Mom are my real parents.” He looked at me. “I’ll take care of you both. I’ll always take care of Leah.”

From that day forward, Ethan’s trajectory was a straight line pointing up, but he never tried to leave me behind. When MIT accepted him, he insisted they find a place for me, lobbying for them to lower their admission standards. When he was offered a teaching position after his doctorate, he demanded they create an administrative role for me in his department.

I was terrified I wouldn't be able to keep up.

But Ethan would look at me with that unwavering intensity. “When I was eight, my parents left me in that stairwell. I sat there all night, from dusk till dawn. You were the one who found me, Leah. You brought me home. I swore to myself in that moment that I would never, ever leave you. I wouldn’t be who I am today without you. No matter how high I fly, I will never let you go.”

That was Ethan. Stubborn to his core. Once he fixed on something, he never let go.

It was true for his research projects.

It was true when he pursued me.

And, it turned out, it was true when he fell for someone else.

“He cheated?” Stella’s eyes were wide with disbelief. “But you guys were childhood sweethearts. You grew up together. After all that, he cheated?” She leaned forward. “Who was she? Some rich heiress? A supermodel? One of those scheming, femme fatale types you see in the movies?”

None of the above.

Ethan’s affair was with a dark and wiry, entirely unremarkable girl who sold flowers from a cart at the farmer’s market.

By the time he was twenty-seven, Ethan had achieved more professionally than most people do in a lifetime. He was no longer chasing accolades or money. He started pouring his energy into personal hobbies. He had no interest in stocks or golf or any of the usual pastimes. Instead, he developed a sudden, all-consuming passion for botany.

Exotic imports, cheap annuals, common daisies, rare orchids—Ethan bought them all, filling a small greenhouse he’d built behind our house.

His favorite, he always said, was the iris. The same type I had given him as a seedling for his birthday years ago.

“This is the plant that started it all,” he told me once, his eyes gleaming. “To think that such an unremarkable seed, with the right human intervention, can be cultivated into something so magnificent. The process… it’s fascinating.”

He said he loved flowers. But what he loved more was the process of making them bloom.

In that small, glass-walled world, he was God. He decided what flourished and what withered. Life and death were entirely up to him.

I never really understood what he meant. A flower was a flower. It bloomed when it bloomed. Why try to control it so much?

But Nora, the flower girl who was helping him unload a shipment of soil that day, looked up at him with wide, adoring eyes.

“Professor Vance is right,” she said, her voice breathy with awe. “I feel the same way. A flower’s beauty depends entirely on the gardener’s care. Look how well this iris grew. That was all my work.”

And just like that, on a crisp autumn day surrounded by blooming irises, they connected.

Because of the flowers.

And because of me.