Novels by KIRTI

CLARAThe text came in at eight on a Thursday morning.Elliot: Are you free for coffee?She looked at it. Elliot texted for logistics, not for social things. If he wanted to see someone he had his assistant call their assistant and things got arranged. A direct text at eight in the morning asking if she was free meant something was going on.She typed back: Give me an hour.✦ ✦ ✦He was already there when she arrived. In civilian clothes, which she noticed immediately because Elliot in civilian clothes meant he hadn't come from the office and wasn't going to the office and was therefore not in performance mode. He looked like a person instead of a CEO, which was rarer than it should have been.She got a coffee and sat across from him."What happened?" she said."Nothing bad." He looked at his cup. "I just needed to talk to someone who knew me before all of this.""Before all of what?""Before I knew what I was actually like," he said. He said it without self-pity, just as a fact. Cl

Three days after Sunday and the world had not ended.That was still a surprise, honestly. He'd been bracing for something to fall apart for so long that the absence of falling apart felt suspicious. He lay in bed on Wednesday morning and listened to the building and waited for the thing to go wrong.Nothing went wrong. A bus went past outside. Someone's alarm was going off two floors up and then stopped. The twins shifted, both of them, doing their usual morning check-in.He got up and made tea.It was different. He'd expected different, but this was a specific kind of different he hadn't planned for. Quieter. Like something that had been taking up a lot of space in his chest had been put down, and now there was just room where that thing used to be. He didn't know what to do with all the room yet. He kept reaching for the weight of the secret and finding it wasn't there.It was like forgetting you'd been holding something and then noticing your hands were empty.✦ ✦ ✦His phone buzz

Week 22 — Kieran POVIt was eleven-forty and he'd been staring at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes.He knew this because he'd checked the time when he started reading it and checked again just now and the only difference was that the tea beside his laptop had gone completely cold. The paragraph was about contractor liability thresholds in the phase three agreement and it had made sense the first time he read it at nine o'clock and apparently stopped making sense somewhere around the tenth reading.He was twenty-two weeks pregnant with twins and it was almost midnight and his brain had stopped cooperating.He got up.He went to the kitchen. He stood in front of the open fridge for a while. Nothing looked right. He wanted something but he couldn't name it, the kind of craving that was more like an itch than an actual appetite. He stood there long enough that the fridge started making the little alarm sound it made when you left the door open too long.He closed the fridge. He looke

ELLIOTHe had a habit he hadn't told anyone about.Every morning when he got to the office, he walked past Kieran's workstation on the way to his own. He didn't stop. He didn't slow down. He just walked past it the same way you walked past a chair where someone used to sit, without deciding to look and somehow always looking anyway.Ryan had been keeping it ready. The monitor was on, the way Kieran left it. The cable management along the back of the desk was still neat and precise, each wire exactly where it was supposed to be. The small spider plant in the corner had been there since week four and was still alive, green and completely unfussy, growing in the particular way plants grew when someone was actually looking after them.The first week Elliot assumed Ryan was watering it. The second week he walked past it and noticed the soil was damp and Ryan was in a meeting that had started forty minutes ago. He'd stood there for a second, doing the math, and then walked on without saying

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: To Every Reader Who Has Been on This JourneyFirstly thank you. Genuinely. If you have read this far, you have spent a lot of hours with Kieran and Elliot and Maya and Dr. Chen and all the complicated, messy, real people who live in this story. That means everything to me.I want to be honest with you about something.Some of you noticed it. I saw your comments and your messages, and you were right to notice it. The pregnancy timeline moved too fast. You went from Kieran finding out about the twins at week ten to suddenly being in the third trimester, and the weeks in between the quiet ones, the hard ones, the ones where someone falls slowly in love without letting themselves know it those weeks were missing.They were always part of the story in my head. The Tuesday lunches that Kieran never asked for. The shirt that didn't fit on a Monday morning and the eight minutes on a bathroom floor. The way Elliot watered that plant himself and wouldn't let Ryan touch

CLARAThe fundraiser dinner was the kind of event Clara had been attending on Elliot's arm for four years, which meant she knew the room before she walked into it. Same faces, roughly. Same conversations about the same things with the same careful professional cheer layered over the same careful professional sizing-up. She'd gotten good at it. She'd probably gotten too good at it.She wasn't on Elliot's arm tonight. She was just herself, which was a thing she was still getting used to in the way you got used to a chair that had been rearranged. Not bad. Just different.She found a spot near the windows with a reasonable view of the room and a glass of something she wasn't really drinking and watched the evening happen.Elliot was across the room.She'd known him for four years. She'd been engaged to him for two of them. She knew the specific way he navigated a professional room, the efficient warmth of it, the way he could give someone thirty seconds of his full attention and make the

Svetlana showed up at eleven-thirty with a paper bag of sandwiches and immediately started looking at the wrong wall.Katya was in the middle of a measurement on the east window sill, balancing the tape with her knee the way she'd done a thousand times, when she heard footsteps she recognised and looked up to find her sister standing twenty feet away in the courtyard, neck craned back, staring at the west side of the building with her hand shading her eyes."That wall has a problem," Svetlana said, without looking at her."Good morning to you too.."The stone there." Svetlana pointed. "The third row from the top on the right section. The fill between two of the blocks looks wrong. Different colour than the rest."Katya looked. She saw what Svetlana was pointing at. It was a difference of maybe three shades, something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it."Late repair," Katya said. "Nineteen-forties probably. Non-original material, we know about it.""Okay, but if the fill is alrea

The meeting Irina wasn't supposed to know about happened on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon in a private dining room above a restaurant on the east side of the city.She knew about it anyway, because she had sources and Gregor did not know about all of them. One of the waitstaff at that restaurant had a sister who ran a supply account with Volkov shipping. Small connections. Irina had spent twelve years building a web of small connections, and right now that web was telling her things she did not enjoy knowing.Three men in that room: Gregor Malshin, regional council chair, sixty-one years old, a wolf who had been building quiet power in this region for two decades by finding other people's soft spots and pressing on them. Beside him, the Petrov pack representative, young, nervous, mostly there because Gregor had something over his family going back eight years. And across the table, two senior wolves from the Shashin pack, who had wanted a larger cut of the river trade routes for t

She put the envelope on the kitchen table and sat down and read it a third time.She wasn't sure what she was looking for on the third read. The first time had been enough to understand it. The second time had been her checking that she'd understood correctly. The third time was something else — her brain needing to go over the words slowly, one at a time, and let each one land before moving to the next.99.9%.Dmitri Volkov. Her boys.She'd known. She'd known from the first morning at the monastery when she'd turned around and seen his face across the courtyard and then looked at her sons and the comparison had been so obvious, so right there, that she'd had to breathe through it before she could move. The amber of Niko's eyes, the way Ivan tilted his head when he was thinking — she'd looked at those things every day for four years and seen her own colouring and told herself that was all she was seeing.She'd known and she'd filed it under not right now and not dealing with this toda

The envelope arrived at nine in the morning and he left it on his desk until eleven.He knew what it was. He'd been waiting for four days since he'd sent the samples to the pack doctor's private lab — no hospital record, no shared system, just a clean result delivered to him and no one else. He'd done this because Katya didn't need to find out through a document that had gone through half a dozen hands before reaching her. She'd find out because he told her.He worked until eleven. He read the Helsinki manifest. He answered two messages from the Riga office. He looked at the border patrol report Irina had left on his desk. He did all of it normally, efficiently, one thing after the other.At eleven he opened the envelope.One page. Lab letterhead. Technical information across the top half that he read quickly. A number at the bottom.99.9%.He put the page down on his desk. He put both hands flat, one on either side of it, and looked at it.He had known. He'd known from the first mome

Dmitri's going to be my friend."Niko said it the way he said most things — right in the middle of breakfast, between bites, like he was reporting the weather.Katya had been lifting her coffee cup. She put it back down."What?""He's going to be my friend," Niko said. He had porridge on his chin and full confidence in his eyes. "I decided last night.""That's not really how friendship works, Niko. You don't just decide."He looked at her like she'd said something puzzling. "Yes you do. I decided Leo was going to be my friend at the last school and then he was. I decided Maya was going to be my friend at the park and then she was. That's how I do it.""Leo and Maya are four years old. Dmitri is a grown man.""So?" He ate another spoonful. "You're grown and you're my friend.""I'm your mother.""You're both," he said, like this was obvious, and went back to his porridge.Katya opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked across the table at Ivan, who was eating his toast in the careful, met

The second cup had been on her site table every morning for three days.The first morning she'd noticed it and assumed one of the workers had left an extra. Then she'd seen him come through the east wing archway with two paper cups and set one down at her end of the table and she'd understood. She'd said nothing. She'd kept working.The second morning she'd arrived before him and the table had been empty and she'd felt the absence of the second cup before she could stop herself from feeling it, which was information she did not want to have and filed away quickly under not thinking about this.The third morning she sat down and drank her own coffee and looked at her blueprint for the west courtyard drainage and thought about water flow and load-bearing walls and the specific challenge of a building that had been patched and re-patched across four centuries. She thought about the work. She did not think about the second cup.He came at seven forty-five. Same as the previous two days. T