Nadia's POV
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Patricia Owens calls at exactly eight o'clock.
I'm still in the hospital chair beside my mother's bed, shoes on, phone already in my hand. I answer before the second ring.
Her voice is crisp and efficient and immediately reassuring in the way that competent people are reassuring — not because they're warm but because they sound like they've handled worse than this before breakfast.
"I've reviewed the Holloway documentation," she says. "All of it. The heirship provision, the founding documents, the shell company structure. I've also been informed about a sealed letter." A brief pause. "Ms. Holloway, the claim is valid. It's going to be a fight, but it's a fight you can win."
I close my eyes for exactly three seconds.
"And the letter?" I ask.
"That comes to you directly," she says. "Mr. Vance will courier it this morning. I'd advise reading it before our first full meeting." Another pause, shorter this time. "I should tell you — I've been practicing law for twenty-two years. I don't say a claim is winnable unless I mean it."
She hangs up.
My mother stirs. Opens her eyes. Looks at me with that same face from last night — reading the language only she knows.
"You didn't sleep," she says.
"I slept a little," I lie.
She watches me. "Something's different about you this morning."
I look at her. I think about how much she doesn't know. How much I'm going to have to tell her. How her face will move through shock and guilt and love, probably in that order, when she finds out about the inheritance, about the letter, about the man I married last night in a consultation room two floors below where she slept.
"I'll explain everything soon," I tell her. "Today you just rest."
She doesn't look satisfied. But she closes her eyes.
I stand up, straighten my dress, and go pack my life into boxes.
-
My apartment takes three hours.
I am ruthlessly efficient about it. I don't let myself slow down or hold things too long or look at photographs for more than three seconds each. That way leads to sitting on the floor and I've already done that once this week.
I keep the books — all of them, two full shelves. I keep the photographs of my mother, my father from before everything went wrong, my college graduation, Dom and me at twenty-three looking like we owned the world. I keep the coffee maker because it's mine, I bought it, and it makes genuinely good coffee.
I leave everything Ethan gave me.
Not dramatically. Not in a pile on the floor or arranged to make a point. I simply don't put those things in boxes. The jewelry goes back in the dish on the dresser. The silk robe he brought from a business trip gets folded neatly on the bed. The framed photo of our third anniversary — the one where we look happy because we were, back then, for a while — stays on the shelf.
I close the door on that life without looking back.
The car arrives at exactly the time Marcus said it would. Black. Quiet. The driver takes my boxes without being asked and loads them without a word.
I sit in the back and watch the city slide past the window.
I tell myself: this is a transaction. You signed a contract. You will perform the role of Mrs. Steele with precision and purpose and you will use this year to reclaim what belongs to your family. That's all this is. That's all it needs to be.
I'm good at performing. Seven years of marriage taught me that.
What seven years of marriage also taught me is that performance has a cost. A slow one. The kind you don't notice until one day you reach for yourself and find the distance between who you are and who you've been pretending to be is much further than you thought.
I'm not going to do that again.
Whatever I perform as Mrs. Steele in public, I am keeping myself — the real, unperformed version — fully intact. I made that decision somewhere around 4 AM in my mother's hospital room.
I am the only thing I cannot afford to lose.
-
Steele Tower appears through the windshield.
I look up at it. Sixty-two floors. Glass and steel and controlled silence, the kind of building that makes you feel observed just by standing near it.
I pick up my bag and walk in.
The lobby security already knows my name. That shouldn't surprise me — Marcus is thorough — but it does, slightly. A woman named Rosa meets me at the elevator. She's warm and practical and gives me a tour of the apartment on the fifty-eighth floor with the efficiency of someone who respects other people's time.
The space is beautiful. Enormous. Everything pristine and perfectly chosen and slightly airless in the way that spaces are airless when they've never had real living done inside them.
My boxes look small in the middle of it.
Rosa shows me the kitchen last. "Mr. Steele asked me to make sure the coffee is stocked," she says. "He mentioned you have a specific preference."
I go still.
"He mentioned that," I say carefully.
"Yes, ma'am. He said you'd probably bring your own maker but to have the beans ready." She opens a cabinet. Three different varieties. All good ones.
I stare at the cabinet for a moment longer than necessary.
Then I thank her and she leaves and I stand alone in this enormous silent apartment and take stock of where I am.
My phone buzzes.
Ethan. Again. The fourth time since last night. I haven't answered any of them. His messages have gone from call me tonight to Nadia this is important to I know about Marcus to, twenty minutes ago, just my name. One word. Nadia.
The desperation curve. I recognize it. It's the sound of a plan falling apart.
I set the phone face-down.
A knock at the apartment door.
I open it. A courier. An envelope in his hand, sealed, with my full name handwritten on the front in writing I don't recognize.
My grandfather's letter.
My hands are steady. They've been steady all morning. But holding this envelope — this thing written before I existed by a man who put my name in documents before I was born — my hands do something they haven't done since last night.
They shake.
I close the door. I sit on the floor right there in the entryway — I seem to keep ending up on floors lately — and I open the envelope.
The letter inside is two pages. Handwritten. Dated fifteen years ago.
I read the first line.
And I understand immediately why Marcus hasn't told me everything yet.
Because the first line says: Nadia, if you're reading this, then your father made the choice I was afraid he would make. And there are people around you who are not what they seem — including, I'm sorry to tell you, the man who gives you this letter.