Novels by BIM

Five Years LaterAva’s POVFive years is long enough to build an entirely different life out of the ashes of an old one. I know, because I did it.I don’t think about that night as often as I used to. The candles, the roses, the envelope on the table, for years those memories used to ambush me at the strangest moments, in elevators, in the middle of meetings, in the quiet seconds before falling asleep. Now they mostly stay where I’ve put them: in the past, filed away, useful only as a reminder of how far I’ve come.My grandfather’s company had been a modest textile manufacturer when Richard Bennett first handed me the paperwork in his downtown office, my hands still trembling from a night I hadn’t finished processing yet. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t even particularly profitable. But it was mine, entirely and completely mine, and something about that ownership lit a fire in me I hadn’t known I had.I threw myself into it the way only someone with nothing left to lose can. I worked e

Starting OverAva’s POVThe hospital lights felt too bright when I walked back in, like the whole building was staring at me, waiting to see what else could possibly go wrong tonight.Dr. Whitfield met me in a small consultation room instead of the waiting area, which told me before he said a single word that this wasn’t going to be a quick conversation. He had a folder open in front of him, his expression careful in the way doctors get when they’re choosing their words with more precision than usual.“First,” he said, “I want you to know the baby is safe. The pregnancy itself is progressing normally.”I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Okay. Okay, that’s good.”“But we ran a broader panel on your bloodwork given some of the markers we saw, and I want to talk to you about what came back.” He turned the folder slightly toward me, pointing to a section I didn’t fully understand. “There’s an indication of a rare inherited condition, one that can affect fetal developmen

Leaving Without Looking BackAva’s POVI didn’t cry while I packed. I think I’d used up whatever tears I had left on the stairs, in that one dizzy moment when the world tilted sideways and I nearly lost the only proof I had left that any of this mattered.I moved through the bedroom slowly, pulling open drawers I’d once arranged with so much hope, back when I still believed this house was going to become a home instead of a waiting room. I didn’t take much. A year of marriage had filled these closets with expensive things, dresses Lucas’s assistant had picked out for events, jewelry that came in boxes heavier than the gifts themselves and none of it belonged to me in any way that mattered. I left it all hanging exactly where it was.What I did take fit into a single suitcase.A framed photograph of my parents, taken the summer before my mother got sick, both of them laughing at something just out of frame. My father’s old wristwatch, stopped at some hour I’d never bothered to fix bec

The End of My MarriageAva’s POVMy hands were shaking so badly it took me two tries to open the envelope.Part of me had already built a small, foolish story to explain it away. A business trip he wanted to surprise me with. Papers from his grandmother’s estate. Anything but what it actually was.I pulled out the stack of documents and stared at the words printed across the top page in plain, merciless black letters.PETITION FOR DIVORCE.For a moment I genuinely thought I had misread it. I blinked and looked again, waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. They didn’t.“Lucas.” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Is this some kind of joke?”He didn’t sit down. He stood on the other side of the table, arms crossed, watching me the way he might watch a stranger deliver bad news in a meeting l, calm, composed, already three steps ahead of my reaction.“It isn’t a joke, Ava. I want to end this marriage.”I laughed, a short, disbelieving soun

The Anniversary That Changed EverythingAva’s POVI woke up smiling before I even opened my eyes.Today was my first wedding anniversary with Lucas Sterling.For most people, that sentence alone would sound like a dream, married to one of the most powerful men in the city, living in a house bigger than the apartment building I grew up in. But my marriage hadn’t started with romance. It started with his grandmother’s insistence and my quiet, foolish hope that love could grow where none had been planted.I still believed it could.I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting myself imagine tonight going differently than every other night in the past year. Maybe Lucas would smile at me the way he smiled at his business partners when a deal went well. Maybe he’d finally look at me like a wife instead of an arrangement he was still getting used to.One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of trying.He had never been unkind to me. Not once. He never raised his voice, never