Novels by Heba El Garhy

The headline was waiting for me on my phone at 6:12 a.m., before I'd even gotten out of bed.ASHCOMBE HEIRESS UNDER SEC SCRUTINY? Sources question how ex-wife timed her 18% Whitlock buy.I read it lying on my back in the dark, the phone held above my face, the baby turning over slowly under my other hand like someone reading over my shoulder.It was a financial blog called The Ledger Line, the kind of site that traders kept open in a second tab and pretended not to. The article was short and very careful. It never said I'd broken the law. It just asked questions. Had Leah Ashcombe, during three years of marriage to Whitlock Logistics' CEO, been privy to confidential merger plans? Had she used that information to time her share purchases? Was it a coincidence that she'd begun buying the week after her divorce?Sources close to the company say the Securities and Exchange Commission has been made aware.Sources close to the

"What envelope?" Grant said.Okafor looked at me. I looked at Grant. For a second, nobody in the room said anything, and I could hear the elevator cables humming through the wall."Ashcombe business," I said."It came in the same handwriting as something else. Your lawyer just said so.""And you just agreed to no personal questions." I held his eyes. "Thirty seconds into the truce, Grant. That has to be a record, even for you."His jaw tightened. I watched him want to push, and I watched him decide not to, and I didn't know which of those two things surprised me more."If it's dangerous," he said quietly, "you'll tell me.""If it's dangerous, I'll tell Okafor."He picked up his folder. He left the croissants. At the door he stopped, the way he'd stopped at my office door four days ago, and spoke without turning around."Eat something," he said. "Please."Then he was gone, and Okafor closed the door behind him and

I didn't sleep. I lay in my childhood bed with the photograph face down on the nightstand and listened to the house settle around me, and a little after one I heard a car on the gravel, and then the gates, and then nothing.At six, I gave up and got dressed.Thomas had the car at the door by six-fifteen without being asked. He looked at my face in the rearview mirror once, the way he'd looked at it the night I left Grant, and turned the radio on low."Somebody came to the house last night," I said, when we were on the highway."Yes, miss.""Who?"Thomas kept his eyes on the road. "A visitor for Mr. Ashcombe, miss. He didn't stay long.""That isn't an answer.""No, miss," Thomas agreed. "It isn't."I let it go. I had enough secrets of my own to carry into Manhattan that morning. I didn't have room for my grandfather's.* * *He was waiting in the lobby on Water Street at seven.

By eleven o'clock, the fifty-second floor was empty except for Grant, Marcus, and a cleaning crew who had given up trying to vacuum around them.They'd taken over the small conference room next to his office. Pell's bound report sat open in the middle of the table, bristling with yellow tabs. Around it, in rough concentric circles, lay everything Marcus had been able to pull from the finance servers without asking anyone in finance: source spreadsheets, draft versions, email chains, the shipping volumes from Savannah and Norfolk going back three years."Again," Grant said. "From the beginning."Marcus rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. He'd taken off his tie at nine and his shoes at ten. "Sir, we've done the beginning four times.""Then the fifth time will be faster."Marcus didn't argue. That was one of the reasons Grant had kept him for six years. He pulled the laptop closer and started reading numbers aloud, and Grant followed along in the repo

My grandfather didn't shout. He'd never shouted in his life. When Hector Ashcombe was angry, he got quieter, and slower, and more polite, until people would have paid good money to be shouted at instead.He was very polite that evening."Sit down, Leah."He was in the greenhouse again, of course. It was nearly dark outside, and the glass walls had turned into black mirrors that threw back the lamps and the orchids and the two of us, standing too far apart. He hadn't turned around when I came in. He was repotting something small and white, his big hands moving with a gentleness I'd never once seen him use on a person."I'd rather stand," I said."I know you would. Sit anyway. You're carrying my great-grandchild and you've been on your feet since seven."I sat on the edge of the potting bench. The envelope was still in my bag, unopened. I'd promised Okafor I wouldn't open it in the car, and then I'd sat in the back seat for forty minutes with

The pen was heavier than it looked. Black lacquer, Kerr Capital's logo stamped in gold near the clip. Of course it was.I uncapped it.Across the table, Sebastian relaxed. It was a very small thing, a loosening in his shoulders, the look of a man who'd just heard the dice land the way he'd called them. Celeste leaned forward in her chair. Somewhere to my left, Pell let out a breath through his nose.Grant didn't move at all.I pulled the motion toward me. Three pages. A signature line at the bottom of the last one, with Ashcombe Maritime, by its authorized officer typed underneath in neat capitals.I wrote across it, in letters big enough to read from the far end of the table.ABSTAIN.Then I capped the pen, set it on top of the papers, and slid the whole stack back down the polished wood. It stopped in front of Sebastian, exactly where his pen had stopped in front of me.For a second, nobody understood what t