Ethan's POV
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Nadia still hasn't texted back.
I check my phone for the eleventh time in an hour and the screen is the same as it was five minutes ago — my message sitting there, delivered, unread.
We need to talk when you get back.
Simple. Clean. The kind of message that says everything without saying anything. I wrote seven different versions before I landed on that one. Too apologetic looks weak. Too cold looks cruel. I needed something in the middle — something that signaled the conversation was coming without making her defensive before it happened.
I'm good at this. Calibrating tone. Managing outcomes. I've been doing it my whole life, mostly because growing up in the shadow of Marcus Steele requires a very specific set of social survival skills that I developed early and sharpened often.
"She's not answering?" Vanessa appears from the kitchen. She has that look she gets — the carefully neutral one that's actually not neutral at all.
"She's at the hospital with her mother," I say. "She probably doesn't have her phone."
Vanessa sits beside me. "You need to just call her, Ethan."
"I know how to handle my own marriage," I say.
She goes quiet. I hear how that sounded. I don't apologize. Not because I don't want to but because I'm distracted and when I'm distracted I become a worse version of myself and I know it and I can't currently fix it.
The truth is I've been distracted for three days.
Because three days ago I did something that made complete sense at the time and is now sitting in the back of my head with the specific weight of a decision you can't undo.
The transfer. The money. Sent exactly where my mother told me to send it, to the account that handled the Holloway acquisition logistics. I didn't ask too many questions. I never ask too many questions when my mother is involved, because her answers always lead somewhere I don't want to go.
She said it was a formality. She said the acquisition needed clean funding lines. She said the amount I transferred was simply redirecting money that was already allocated.
I told myself that was true because it was easier than the alternative.
But at 2 AM last night I woke up and lay in the dark and thought about the fact that the amount I transferred was exactly — exactly — what would have cleared Robert Holloway's debt before the acquisition happened. And I thought about the fact that Nadia's father called me three weeks ago asking if I had any way to help, and I told him I didn't.
I told him I didn't.
I press my thumb into the center of my palm and push until it hurts a little.
I'm not a bad person. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself. I made choices that protected my family's position and my mother's interests and my own future. Those are not the choices of a bad person. Those are the choices of someone who understands how the world actually works.
Nadia never understood how the world works. She was always too principled about things. Too clean. It was one of the things I loved about her at the beginning and one of the things that made me feel small by the end.
You can love someone and still outgrow them.
That's not cruelty. That's just life.
My phone rings.
Mom.
I answer immediately. "Hey—"
"Where are you?" Her voice is tight.
"Home. Why?"
"Marcus was seen at Whitmore Medical Center tonight." She says it the way you say the building is on fire — like the words themselves are an emergency. "Two hours ago. He went up to the cardiac floor."
I sit up straighter. "What?"
"You heard me."
My brain starts moving fast. Whitmore Medical. Cardiac floor. Clara Holloway is on the cardiac floor at Whitmore Medical. Nadia is at Whitmore Medical.
"Why would Marcus be there?" I say, though I'm already sorting through possibilities and none of them feel comfortable.
"That's what I need you to find out," she says. "Call him."
"I can't just call Marcus and ask him why he was at a hospital—"
"Ethan." Her voice drops to the specific frequency she uses when she needs me to understand something is serious. "If Marcus is anywhere near the Holloway situation, we have a problem. You know what he's like. He doesn't go places without reasons and his reasons are never small."
She hangs up.
I lower the phone.
Vanessa is watching me from across the room. "Everything okay?"
"Fine," I say.
It is not fine.
I stand up and walk to the window and look out at the city. I think about Marcus. I've been thinking about Marcus my whole life in one way or another — he married my father's widow when I was fourteen and turned our comfortable, predictable world into something sharper and more demanding almost overnight. He never treated me badly. He was never unkind. He was simply always, always three steps ahead of everyone in the room, including me, and he never pretended otherwise.
I learned more from watching Marcus than from any classroom. Mostly I learned that the most dangerous move a person can make is underestimating what he knows.
I pick up my phone. I call his number.
It rings four times.
Then: "Ethan."
His voice is perfectly calm. It's always perfectly calm. That's the most unsettling thing about him. You can never tell what's underneath it.
"Hey," I say, and I hate that I sound like I'm seventeen. "Mom said you were at Whitmore tonight. Everything okay?"
A pause. Two seconds. Three.
With anyone else, a pause is just a pause.
With Marcus, a pause is a sentence.
"Everything is fine," he says. "Get some sleep."
He hangs up.
I stand there holding the phone.
Everything is fine.
He said those words in a specific way. Even. Controlled. The way he says things when they are the opposite of fine and he needs you to believe otherwise while he finishes what he's doing.
I open my phone. I go to Nadia's contact. I call.
Straight to voicemail.
I try once more.
Voicemail again.
I open our text thread. My last message still sitting there. Delivered.
Still unread.
I type a new one: Nadia. Call me. Tonight. It's important.
I watch it deliver.
Then my phone buzzes with a notification. A news alert from a legal filing database I set up months ago to monitor Holloway-adjacent activity.
I open it.
My blood goes cold.
A marriage license. Filed tonight. Whitmore Medical Center district office.
Two names.
Marcus Steele.
Nadia Holloway.