CHAPTER FOUR

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 Cole situation.* The body of the email is short. My father was always short on writing. He said what he needed and nothing else.

The email says: *Confirmed. Source is reliable. Proceed with the call. If he doesn't end it within the month, move to the second option. She has a sister. Use that.*

She has a sister.

I watched Nadia read that line twice. I watched the color leave her face.

"The copied address," she says slowly. She scrolls up. Read it again. Her hand is steady, but her breathing isn't. "This is—"

"Yes," I say.

She looks up at me.

"Dara told him." Her voice is flat. Emptied out. "My sister told your father about us."

"The email address is registered to a consulting account your sister opened six years ago. My lawyers confirmed it yesterday." I took the phone back. "She was on his payroll for four months. October through January. She was paid forty-three thousand dollars for three transfers."

Nadia doesn't say anything.

I let the silence sit because there's nothing I can add to it that would help. Forty-three thousand dollars. Her sister. The person she's been leaning on for five years while she raised my son alone and worked double shifts and let final notices pile up on her counter.

"She needed the money," Nadia says finally. Not defending her. Just stating it. Like she's trying to make the shape of it make sense.

"A lot of people need money," I say. "They don't all do that."

"You don't know what Dara was dealing with at the time."

"Nadia—"

"I'm not saying it's okay." She puts her hand flat on the counter. "I'm saying I need a minute to think."

I gave her a minute. I stand across from her in the kitchen and I watch her process something that is genuinely devastating — the knowledge that the person she trusted most made a decision that cost her six years. That cost Miles six years.

I'm angry too. I've been angry since four this afternoon. But my anger and her anger are different shapes and I know better than to put mine in the room right now.

"Does she know?" Nadia asks. "Do you know?"

"No."

"Does she know you found me?"

"I haven't spoken to your sister. I came to you first."

She nods slowly. Something moves behind her eyes — gratitude, maybe, or just relief that she has the information before Dara does. That she has something to hold before someone takes it from her.

"Miles calls her Auntie D," she says quietly. "He loves her. She's at our place twice a week. She brings him those dinosaur crackers he likes, and she reads to him and she—" She stops. "She has been here every week for five years, acting like she didn't know what she did."

"Yes."

"And the whole time she was watching me struggle, and she knew why."

"Yes."

Nadia turns away from me and looks at the wall for a moment. I don't rush her.

Then she turns back, and her face has settled into something harder. She's not crying. I don't think Nadia cries easily anymore — I think she used up a portion of that in that clinic where she was sick and alone two months after Miles was born, and what's left is just this. Quiet steel.

"What do you want to do?" she asks.

"About Dara?"

"About all of it. You came back tonight with a plan. I know you — you don't move without one. So what is it?"

She's right. I did come back with a plan. I've had the outline of it since I left my office at five. But standing here looking at her, I realized the plan assumed she'd be an obstacle. It assumed I'd have to push through her resistance to get to Miles. It assumed the dynamic I walked into this morning — her guarded, me arriving with leverage.

The papers in that envelope changed the dynamic.

She didn't keep Miles from me out of spite or selfishness. She made a decision from fear and protection and a twenty-four-year-old's flawed logic. I don't agree with it. But I understand the difference.

"I want to be in his life," I say. "Properly. Not scheduled visits with a mediator. Not a legal arrangement that makes him feel like a line item. I want to be his father."

"That's not a plan. That's a goal."

"The plan involves us working together. No lawyers yet. No courts." I hold her gaze. "I want to spend time with him. I want him to know who I am before we tell him what I am. I don't want to walk in tomorrow and introduce myself as his father and blow up the only world he knows."

She considers that. I can see her testing it for angles, to see what I could take from it, for where the trap is.

"And the acquisition?" she says. "My HR file is flagged in your due diligence. That's not a coincidence that goes away."

"I'll have it removed."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because you shouldn't be collateral damage in a business deal."

She has studied me for a long time.

"You're being reasonable," she says carefully. "That worries me more than if you'd come in here with a lawyer."

"I know."

She pulls out a chair from the kitchen table and sits down. Not an invitation, just a decision — she's thinking, and she needs to be off her feet for it. I stay standing.

"Give me a week," she says finally. "Before you tell him anything. Before we change anything. Seven days."

"To do what?"

She looks up at me.

"To talk to Dara."

I open my mouth, and she holds up one hand.

"Alone," she says. "She's my sister. What she did was wrong, and I need to look her in the eye when I say that. Without you in the room, without lawyers, without any of it." Her jaw is tight. "She's my mess to handle."

I don't love it. But I understand it.

"Seven days," I agree.

I pick up my coat from the back of the chair. She walks me to the door. We stand in the hallway for a second — the same hallway from this morning, but it feels like a different day entirely, like we've moved years in the space of twelve hours.

"Ezra." She says my name and I stop. "If you're doing this because you feel obligated—"

"I'm not."

"If this is about control. About what's yours—"

"It's not."

She looks at me. Really looks, the way she used to when we were together, and she was deciding whether to believe me.

"Miles asked about you," she says quietly. "After you left this morning," he asked if the tall man was coming back."

Something moves in my chest that I don't have a name for yet.

"What did you tell him?"

She meets my eyes.

"I told him I didn't know," she says. "I wasn't going to lie to him. Not about you. Not anymore."

I nod. I turned to leave.

Then her phone buzzes on the counter behind her. I hear her pick it up. I hear the exact moment her breath catches.

"Ezra." Her voice has changed completely. "Wait."

I turn around.

She's staring at her screen, and she's gone pale in a way that has nothing to do with our conversation.

"It's Dara," she says. "She's been calling since five. I ignored it because I thought—" She looks up. "She left a voicemail. She says she knows you came to see me." She pauses. "She says if I talk to you again she'll go to the press."

The hallway is very quiet.

"She'll tell them what?" I ask.

Nadia looks at me with something close to despair.

"That you have a secret heir," she says. "And that you've been hiding him to protect your company's valuation.”