Novels by naomiebhomen122

NADIA'S POV I play the voicemail on speaker.Dara's voice fills the hallway and I listen to my sister — my sister who brings Miles dinosaur crackers and reads him to sleep — threaten to sell my son's existence to a tabloid like it's a business decision. Her voice is steady. Practiced. Like she rehearsed it before she called.She says she knows Ezra came this morning. She says she has been watching this situation for five years, and she knows how it ends for people like her if people like Ezra get involved. She says she has contacts at two publications who have been interested in Ezra Cole's personal life since his company went public last year. And then she says the part that makes me want to sit down on the floor.She says Miles deserves stability. That she did what she did six years ago to protect me. That Gerald Cole would have destroyed my life, and she saw it before I did. And that if Ezra is back now, the same thing will happen, and she will do whatever she has to do to stop it

EZRA'S POV I watch her face change when I say it.She goes very still. The kind of still that isn't calm — it's the opposite of calm. It's a person running every name they know through a filter very quickly and landing on one they don't want to land on.I've seen that look before. In boardrooms. When someone realizes the problem is closer than they thought."Who?" she says."I want to show you something first." I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out my phone. I've had the email open since four this afternoon. I found it while I was going through my father's estate files — something Marcus flagged three weeks ago that I hadn't gotten to yet because I was in the middle of the acquisition and I thought it was routine correspondence. It wasn't routine.I turn the phone toward her.She takes it. Reads.The email is dated six years ago. Four days before, she disappeared. It's from my father's personal account to his lawyer, copied to one other address. The subject line is *re: the Co

NADIA'S POV I watched him open the envelope.I have imagined this moment more times than I can count. In some versions, I'm calm. In some I'm crying. In the version I always hoped for, I never had to do it at all — he never found me, the secret held, Miles grew up, and I found a way to explain it when he was old enough to understand.None of those versions had Ezra standing in my kitchen at six in the evening looking like a man who had been holding himself together with both hands since morning.He pulls out the papers. Three pages. I know them by heart. I typed them myself on a library computer six years ago because I couldn't afford a printer and I didn't want to use the one at his office. I remember my hands shaking over the keyboard. I remember the librarian asking if I was okay and me saying yes, because what else do you say?He reads.I go to the kitchen and fill up a glass of water because I need to do something with my hands. I drink it standing at the sink with my back to hi

EZRA'S POV The first thing I did when I got back to my car was sat there for eleven minutes without starting the engine.I know it's eleven minutes because I watched the clock on the dashboard the entire time. It's the only thing I can look at that makes sense right now. Numbers. Time is moving forward. Something concrete.Because I have just walked out of that apartment with my chest cracked open, and I need sixty seconds before I am Ezra Cole again. Before, I was the man who didn't lose negotiations and didn't flinch and didn't let anything catch him sideways.That apartment caught me completely sideways.I pull out my phone. Marcus has called twice. I have a board meeting at ten and a call with the acquisition lawyers at eleven-thirty and a lunch I scheduled three weeks ago with the woman I've been seeing for eight months. Her name is Claire. She is intelligent and patient, and she has never once made me feel like the ground was moving under me.I put the phone face-down on the pa

NADIA'S POV "Miles, if you spill that cereal, I swear to God."He looks at me over the bowl with my mother's eyes, wide, unbothered, completely unmoved by my threat, and tilts the spoon at a forty-five-degree angle just to test me. Milk pools at the edge. Doesn't spill. He grins."I didn't spill it," he says."You almost spilled it.""Almost doesn't count."Five years old and already a lawyer. I don't know where he got it from. I do know. I just don't say it out loud.I turn back to the kitchen counter and look at the envelope I've been looking at since six this morning. Final notice. The words are printed in red, which feels unnecessary. I know it's final. I have known for three weeks. I have been doing the math in my head every day: what comes in from the diner, what goes out for Miles's daycare, what's left for rent, what's left for utilities, what's left for food, and the answer keeps coming out the same. Not enough. Never quite enough.I fold the envelope face-down. Out of sight