Novels by E.J kate

EMMA The days after Cade stayed the night in my room did not suddenly become easy.I still woke from nightmares more often than I wanted to admit, sometimes with my heart pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest. But the panic no longer followed me all the way into morning. It came, stayed for a while, and eventually loosened its grip. And when I opened my eyes, I was beginning to find things that reminded me I was here, not there.Sometimes Cade was already awake in the chair near the window, his head tilted against the backrest, pretending he hadn’t been watching over me. Other times I found Theo reading in the hallway outside my door, as if he had simply decided that particular patch of floor was the best place in the house to sit. Neither of them asked questions when I wasn’t ready for them. Neither demanded that I prove I was healing.They just stayed.And slowly, their presence stopped feeling like something I had to tolerate and started feeling like somet

EMMAThe knock came in the late afternoon.I stared at the door for several seconds and somehow, I already knew who it was.Something inside me wanted to pretend I wasn’t there. Another part of me was tired of running from people simply because they reminded me of what I had lost.I pushed myself off the bed, crossed the room, and opened the door.Cade stood on the other side.For a moment, I barely recognized him.He looked exhausted. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes, his hair was messier than usual, and the hard confidence he normally carried seemed to have been stripped away. His shoulders were tense, but not with anger. They looked heavy, as though he had been carrying something for too long and was finally beginning to buckle beneath the weight of it.His eyes met mine.Whatever he saw on my face made something flicker across his.Pain.He looked away first and I stepped aside. He entered slowly and stopped near the middle of the room with me closing the door behind him a

EMMATwo weeks had passed since the night Tristan was thrown out.The new safe house was quieter than the last one with smaller rooms, fewer windows facing the road, and a kitchen that still smelled faintly of fresh paint. The move had been efficient and almost wordless. No one had wanted to talk about w hat happened, and no one mentioned Tristan’s name unless it was absolutely necessary. The silence surrounding his betrayal had become almost permanent, like an invisible wall we had all learned to live around.The first few days had been the worst. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Not the Tristan who had betrayed me, but the Tristan I had trusted. The one who had made me laugh when I wanted to cry, who had sat beside me during sleepless nights, who had made me believe, even for a little while, that I had someone in my corner. My mind kept trying to put those two versions of him together, but they refused to fit.Eventually, the pain changed.It didn’t disappear. It simply stop

TRISTANI woke to the smell of blood and whiskey.For a few seconds I stayed still, staring at the ceiling of the investigation room, trying to remember why my left arm felt like it was on fire. Then the night came back in pieces Cade’s fists, Emma’s face, the bottle against the wall, the glass in my hand. I pushed myself upright. A small, dark pool had dried on the floorboards beside the desk. My wrist was stiff and swollen, the cut crusted over.Shame hit me first. It was heavy and familiar.I had promised myself I would not go back to that place. Not after the last time. Not after I had sworn the worst of the grief was behind me. Yet here I was again, sitting in the same room surrounded by the same photographs, having opened the same door I thought I had locked for good.I cleaned the floor in silence, scrubbed the blood from the wood until only a faint stain remained, then went to the bathroom. The shower was so hot it hurt. I stood under it until the water ran clear and my skin

TRISTAN My body hurt with every step.I pushed myself up from the gravel where Cade had thrown me and started walking. The gate closed behind me with a heavy finality that I felt in my chest more than I heard. For a moment, I stood there with my back to the house, staring at the closed gates and trying to convince myself that I could still turn around, that somehow I could explain everything well enough to make them understand.But there was nothing left to explain.I kept going, one foot in front of the other, even though every step sent pain through my ribs. Blood had dried at the corner of my mouth, and my body ached where Cade’s fists had landed, but none of it compared to the look on Emma’s face when Theo told her the truth.That was the part I couldn’t escape.The way she had looked at me.Like she didn’t recognize me anymore.Like every memory she had of me had suddenly become a lie.I reached the secondary road and found my car parked exactly where I had left it days earlier,

EMMAThe nightmare didn’t fade when I opened my eyes.I lay in the dark with my heart slamming against my ribs, the cell walls still pressed against the edges of my vision. For a few seconds, I couldn’t remember where I was. The darkness felt too much like that room, too close and too cold. Tristan’s voice kept overlapping with Victoria’s laugh and the sound of the door being kicked in. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back there. Every time I opened them, I expected to see concrete instead of my bedroom walls.I sat up, pushing the covers away before the next wave could pull me under again. My body felt heavy, but my mind wouldn’t slow down. I left the room without turning on the lights and made my way downstairs, needing somewhere that didn’t feel like it was closing in around me.The kitchen was empty and dimly lit. I filled a glass with water but didn’t drink it. Instead, I sat at the island with my elbows resting against the cold counter, staring at nothing. The silence should

The beach house had stopped feeling new. By the time the last box was broken down and carried to the recycling bin, the rooms had already taken on the shape of the people who lived in them. Emily’s door stayed half-closed most afternoons, music leaking out along with the sound of her laughing into her phone. Amie’s shelves held a careful mess of books and stuffed animals and the smooth stones she brought up from the beach. James’s room still smelled faintly of the pale paint they had chosen together, his crib already feeling smaller than it should. The kitchen held coffee mugs, school notices, and the small plastic cups Amie insisted on using. The wide windows kept the ocean in every room, a constant low presence that made the whole house feel like it was breathing. On a clear Saturday morning, Bella stood at the deck railing with a mug of coffee cooling in her hands and watched the three of them on the sand below. Emily walked ahead with her long teenage stride, phone in one hand, o

AlexI stood in the empty living room of the beach house and listened to the ocean.Two weeks had passed since the morning I realized I was no longer the same man who had once kept everything carefully contained. The years had changed me in ways I still sometimes struggled to name. I had been the steady one, the careful one, the man who built a company and raised a daughter and kept his feelings locked down because that was what survival looked like. Then Bella had walked back into my life, and every wall I had built had cracked open whether I wanted it to or not.I thought about the early days after she returned to Seattle the way I had tried to keep distance and failed. The night in the cabin when the storm and the wine and the truth had finally broken through. The months of secret meetings and quiet fear. The parking lot when she told me she was pregnant and I said the wrong things because terror had made me stupid. The long stretch of silence after she left. The drinking. The guilt

BellaA year passed by fast. So fast I didn't even have time to notice the changes around our house until I did. It happened gradually. One ordinary morning I looked up from the coffee pot and realised the baby who had once fit in the crook of my arm was now a sturdy one-year-old with sticky fingers and a loud, delighted laugh. Amie was way over a year now, tall enough to reach the lower shelves and stubborn enough to argue with entire sentences. Emily had turned fourteen and suddenly seemed taller than I remembered, her legs longer, her voice lower, her attention pulled in a dozen new directions at once.We celebrated James’s birthday the way we had decided we would celebrate most things from now on: quietly and only with the people who lived under our roof—no extended family. No friends. Just the four of us at the kitchen table with a small chocolate cake and one fat candle. Amie insisted on helping blow it out. James laughed so hard he tipped sideways in his high chair. Emily rolle

BellaThe weekend arrived with a soft sense of intention. I woke early, the house still quiet, and sat for a moment on the edge of the bed watching Alex sleep. His face looked peaceful, younger in the morning light.For weeks, my days had been filled with the children's feeding schedules, tantrums that had finally softened, school drop-offs, laundry, and the constant mental list of needs. Somewhere in the middle of becoming the mother of three, I had started to notice the quiet distance growing between us. Not anger. Not resentment. Just the slow, almost invisible way a marriage can drift when one person is always managing everything else.I thought about the stories Alex had once told me, carefully, about the months after Emily was born. How Lauren had been consumed by new motherhood and how he had felt like a visitor in his own home. He had never said it with bitterness, only with a quiet sadness that still sat in his voice years later. I never wanted that for us. Before I was a moth

BellaMorning light filtered softly through the curtains when I woke up, the house still quiet in that brief window before the children stirred. I stretched carefully, feeling my body's familiar pull after months of recovery, and for the first time in a long while, the heaviness that used to settle in my chest was gone. Instead, a steady calm settled in. I could do this. Today I would handle everything alone, and the thought no longer made me anxious.James was the first to wake, his soft coos turning into determined cries from the nursery. I walked in, lifted him from the crib, and settled into the rocking chair. Feeding him felt natural now, no frantic checking of the clock, no second-guessing whether I was doing it right. His dark eyes looked up at me with complete trust, and I smiled down at him, stroking his soft hair. When he finished, I changed him, dressed him in a little blue onesie, and carried him downstairs.Amie was already awake by the time I reached the living room, stan

BellaThe weeks after James came home were a whirlwind of emotions, but the most challenging part was watching Amie adjust to her new brother. It had been about a month since we returned from the hospital, and while the house was full of love, it was also full of adjustment. Amie’s tantrums had been the hardest thing to witness. James arrival had turned her clinginess into something more intense fear, jealousy, and confusion all rolled into one.But I was determined to ensure that it all changed. It started with Mom’s advice. She suggested simple techniques to help both Amie and James feel secure. “Include her in everything,” she said during one of her visits. “Let her feel like she’s part of caring for him. But also give her special time with just you.”I took her words to heart. The first few days were the hardest. I would sit on the couch with James in my arms for feeding, and Amie would immediately crawl over, trying to push him away or climb into my lap. Her cries were heart-wre