Nadia's POV
-
I put the pen down.
Not because I changed my mind. Because my hands suddenly stopped working properly and I need three seconds to make them work again.
The bank notification is still glowing on my phone screen. That transfer. Ethan's name. The exact amount that would have saved my father's company before the acquisition swallowed it whole.
Marcus is watching me. He hasn't moved. He hasn't said a word. He's just sitting there with the patience of someone who already knows how this ends.
I turn my phone face-down.
"I need a moment," I say.
"Take two," he says.
I breathe in slowly. I breathe out slowly. I do the math again, because math is the only thing that doesn't lie to me right now.
Ethan transferred that money three days ago. The acquisition of Holloway Industries was finalized two days ago. Which means he had the exact amount needed to stop it — and instead of telling my father, instead of telling me, he sent it somewhere else.
To someone named D. Vance.
I don't know who D. Vance is.
But I know what it means that Ethan had that money and chose silence.
I pick up the pen. I sign the contract. My signature is neat and steady and I feel something close at the same time — a door, somewhere deep inside me, swinging shut.
Marcus takes the paper. He doesn't look satisfied. He doesn't look anything. He just slides it back into the folder and stands.
"Someone will contact you tomorrow about logistics," he says.
"Wait," I say.
He stops.
"You said you'd show me what the acquisition actually was." I look at him. "You said sign the contract and you'd tell me."
He looks at me for a long moment. "Not tonight," he says. "Tonight you should go see your mother."
Then he walks out.
-
I stand in the hallway for thirty seconds. Then I walk to my mother's room.
Clara is awake. That surprises me — it's past ten and she tires so easily now. But her eyes are open and sharp, and the first thing she does when I walk through the door is look at my face the way only mothers can — like she's reading a language nobody else was taught.
"What happened, baby?" she says.
Her voice is soft but the question is not soft. It's direct. It goes straight to the center of me.
I smile. I've been smiling through things my whole life. I'm very good at it.
"Nothing, Mom. Long day. How are you feeling?"
She doesn't answer that. She just keeps looking at me with those steady eyes.
"Your dress," she says quietly. "That's the one you bought two weeks ago. You hid it in the back of the closet." She pauses. "You were planning something nice."
I keep smiling. "I was. It didn't work out. Plans change."
"Nadia."
"Mom."
She reaches out her hand — the one without the tube — and holds it out toward me. I walk over and take it. I sit in the chair beside her bed and hold my mother's hand and I look at the wall because if I look at her face I will not be able to hold the smile.
"Everything is fine," I tell her. "I promise."
She doesn't believe me. I can feel it in the way her hand squeezes mine — gently, the way you hold something you're worried might break.
But she lets it go. She doesn't push. Because Clara Holloway has always known when to fight and when to simply sit beside her daughter and be warm.
So we sit. And I hold her hand. And I listen to the monitor keep time.
Inside, I am doing something I've never done before. I'm dividing myself deliberately — putting everything about today, about Ethan, about Marcus Steele and that contract and that bank transfer, into a locked room in my chest. I close the door. I press my back against it.
This room — this small, beeping, white-walled room — belongs to my mother.
My falling apart can happen anywhere else. Not here.
-
She falls asleep after twenty minutes, still holding my hand.
I ease my fingers free carefully and stand. I look at her face while she sleeps. She looks smaller than she used to. That scares me more than anything else today. My mother was always the biggest person in every room she entered — not in size, but in something else. Presence. Warmth. The kind of certainty that made you believe things would be okay simply because she was standing in them.
She looks small now.
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead and make her a silent promise. Three words, no sound.
I've got you.
I walk out of the room.
In the hallway, I pull out my phone. I open the bank notification again. I stare at the name.
D. Vance.
I type it into a search. Nothing obvious comes up. I try it with Ethan's name beside it. Still nothing.
Then I try it with Holloway Industries.
One result. A small business registration filing. D. Vance listed as secondary contact for a shell company.
A shell company created four months ago.
I scroll down to find the primary contact name. The person who actually owns it.
My eyes find the name.
I read it once. I read it again.
The phone almost slips out of my hand.
The primary owner of the shell company that received Ethan's transfer — the one that was used to quietly maneuver my father's debt into a forced acquisition — is not Ethan.
It's not anyone from his family.
It's a name I've never connected to any of this.
It's a name that, twenty minutes ago, was sitting across a table from me with a one-page contract and steady hands and the words: I have my reasons. You'll understand them in time.
Marcus Steele.
The man I just married.