Nadia's POV
-
I walk back into the hospital and go straight to the bathroom at the end of the fourth floor corridor.
I turn the cold tap on. I press both hands flat on the edge of the sink and look at myself in the mirror.
Same face. Same dress. Same Nadia who woke up this morning planning an anniversary dinner and is ending the night legally married to a man who has been quietly circling her family for three years.
I look at my reflection for a long time.
Then I splash cold water on my face, dry it with a paper towel, stand up straight, and walk out.
Because I can either fall apart in a hospital bathroom or I can think. And thinking is the only thing right now that will actually help me.
So I think.
Marcus Steele owns the debt. He bought it to protect it. He claims the shell company was a shield, not a weapon. He claims there is a legal path back to an inheritance I didn't know existed. He claims Ethan's family was the real threat.
He also hasn't told me everything. He said as much without saying it. There is something else sitting behind his careful eyes and controlled sentences — something bigger that he is not ready to hand me yet.
I don't like that.
But here's what I keep returning to: my mother has had two years of medical care covered by an anonymous donor. I checked those records six months ago when I first noticed the payments weren't coming from our family account. I spent three weeks trying to trace it. I couldn't find the source. I told myself it was a hospital grant program.
It was him.
Two years ago, Marcus Steele started paying for my mother's care. That was before the contract. Before tonight. Before any arrangement existed.
That doesn't fit the picture of a man running a scheme.
That fits the picture of something else entirely, and I don't have room to examine what that something else is right now.
Right now I need to go sit with my mother.
-
Clara's room is dim and quiet. The night nurse has come and gone. My mother is asleep, her breathing slow and even, her face relaxed in the way it only gets when she's not trying to be strong for anyone.
I pull the chair close to the bed and sit down.
I look at her hands — the ones that braided my hair every morning until I was old enough to do it myself, the ones that clapped loudest at my law school graduation, the ones that gripped mine in the ambulance three months ago when her heart decided it had been working too hard for too long.
I made her a promise earlier tonight. Three words, no sound.
I've got you.
I meant it then. I mean it more now.
I just married a stranger to keep that promise. I found out that stranger has been keeping it quietly for two years already. I found out my husband of seven years knew about an inheritance that belongs to me and has been working to make sure I never see it.
I sit with all of that.
I let it land the way I wouldn't let it land in the hallway or the bathroom or the car. In here, with my mother sleeping two feet away and the monitor keeping its steady beat, I let myself feel the full weight of this day.
It is enormous.
It is almost crushing.
Almost.
I press my fingers against my sternum, right in the center of my chest, and I find something unexpected there. Underneath the exhaustion and the grief and the particular specific pain of finding out that the man you loved was dismantling you with one hand while holding you with the other —
Underneath all of that, something is waking up.
I don't have a clean word for it. It's not anger, though anger is part of it. It's not hope, though maybe that's in there too. It's something older and more basic. The feeling of a person who has been performing smallness for so long that they forgot they were performing — and who has just, today, been stripped of every reason to keep the performance going.
Ethan is gone. The marriage is over. The life I was carefully maintaining — the one where I made myself quieter, easier, less — that life dissolved today in a hospital corridor.
And what's left is just me.
I haven't been just me in a very long time.
I find that I'm not as scared of that as I thought I'd be.
-
My phone buzzes at 2 AM.
A message from a number I don't have saved. But the first line tells me who it is.
Documentation will be with your attorney by 9 AM. — MS
I stare at the initials. Marcus Steele. My husband. On paper.
I type back: I don't have an attorney.
His response comes in under a minute. You do now. Her name is Patricia Owens. She'll call you at eight. She's been briefed on the Holloway matter. She's the best in the city and her retainer is covered.
I look at the message for a long time.
He's moving fast. Faster than I expected. Which means something shifted tonight — something made him accelerate the timeline.
I type: Why faster?
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Get some sleep, Nadia.
Not an answer. Which is, again, its own answer.
Something happened. Something that made Marcus Steele, a man who has been managing this situation from a careful distance for three years, suddenly need to move quickly.
I put the phone down. I look at my mother's sleeping face.
I think about Ethan.
He's across the city right now. Probably sleeping. Probably thinking tomorrow is the day he finally has his clean, quiet conversation with me — the one where he's sorry but firm, where the marriage ends on his terms, where he walks away from seven years of my life with minimum damage to his own.
He has no idea what today was.
He has no idea what I signed tonight.
He has no idea that I already know.
I close my eyes. For the first time all day, I let myself think about what tomorrow looks like.
Not the grief of it. Not the loss. The other part.
The part where I stop being Ethan Steele's discarded wife and start being something he never prepared for.
I don't know exactly what that is yet.
But I can feel it taking shape.
-
At 6 AM, my phone rings. Not Marcus. Not my father.
A number I recognize immediately because I've been staring at it for the last four hours trying to work up the nerve to search it.
D. Vance. Marcus's attorney. The name on the shell company.
My thumb hovers over the answer button.
Why is Marcus's attorney calling me directly at 6 AM?
Why not wait for Patricia Owens at eight?
I answer.
A man's voice. Clipped. Serious.
"Ms. Holloway. I apologize for the hour. This couldn't wait." A pause. "There's something in the Holloway founding documents that Mr. Steele asked me to flag before your morning briefing."
"What is it?" I ask.
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Ms. Holloway," he says carefully. "Your grandfather didn't just leave you an inheritance."
My whole body goes still.
"He left you a letter," the attorney says. "Written fifteen years ago. Sealed. Addressed specifically to you." His voice drops slightly. "We found it last night. And once you read it — everything you think you know about your family, your father, and why any of this happened — will change."