CHAPTER TWO

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 passenger seat.

Miles.

Five years old. Dinosaurs. Half the milk. My jaw on his face like someone made a copy without asking permission.

I've closed forty-three deals in four years. I've sat across from men who had teams of lawyers and decades of leverage, and I've walked out with exactly what I came for every single time. I've done it because I don't panic, and I don't react, and I don't make decisions from the feeling in my chest.

But I have never been in a room with a five-year-old who looked at me and asked if I was somebody's dad.

I started the engine. I drove off.

***************

By nine-thirty, I was in my office on the fourteenth floor with coffee I couldn't taste and Marcus was standing across from me waiting for me to explain why I canceled the ten o'clock.

"Clear my afternoon," I say.

Marcus hasn't written anything down yet. He's been my operations director for three years, and he knows the difference between a routine reschedule and something else. He's looking at me like this is something else.

"The acquisition call at eleven-thirty—"

"Reschedule it."

"Ezra. The sellers are already nervous. If we go dark again they'll—"

"Marcus." I look at him. "Clear my afternoon."

He writes it down.

When he leaves, I sit back and think about what Nadia said at the door. *Because I knew what you'd do. And I wasn't ready to lose him either.*

She said it like it was the most reasonable thing in the world. Like disappearing was a logical response. Like taking my son and building an entire life somewhere, I couldn't see it was just a practical decision she made and has been living fine ever since.

Except she didn't look fine. She looked like a woman running so hard for so long that she'd forgotten what standing still feels like. She looked like the final notice on her counter and yesterday's clothes and the careful way she poured that coffee — like she was measuring it, like every small thing cost something she'd already calculated.

That part I understood. I grew up calculating the same way. I know exactly what that arithmetic looks like on a person's face.

What I don't understand is six years of silence.

I open my laptop and pull up the file Marcus flagged two days ago. The HR record from the hotel acquisition. Nadia's employment history. Three different jobs in five years — waitress, then a retail position that lasted eight months, then the diner she's apparently still at now. No listed emergency contact. No registered father on Miles's record. Just her name, his and the birthdate that made my legal team do a double-take.

I close the laptop.

I need a lawyer. Not the acquisition team — a family lawyer. Someone who can tell me what my rights are, what the process looks like, what I'm legally entitled to after five years of not knowing.

I pick up my phone and put it back down.

Because here's the problem. The moment I make that call, it becomes a legal matter. It becomes adversarial. It becomes Ezra Cole's resources against Nadia's final notice, and I know exactly how that ends, and I know what it would do to her, and I'm sitting here furious at her and I still can't make that call.

Which tells me something about myself I'm not ready to examine.

I go back at six.

I don't call first. I don't have her number. I didn't think to ask this morning because this morning I was standing in her hallway trying to remember how to breathe, and asking for her phone number felt absurd in the context of everything else.

I knock.

She opens the door in different clothes this time. Her hair is up. She looks like she's just gotten home — there's a tiredness in her face that's fresh, layered on top of the older tiredness that lives there permanently. Behind her the apartment is quiet. Miles must be asleep.

She looks at me and then at the time on her phone and then back at me.

"You came back," she says. Not surprised. Not relieved either.

"We need to talk properly," I say. "Not with him in the room."

She leans against the door frame and crosses her arms and I watch her decide something. Some internal calculations she runs quickly and privately before she shows me the result.

"I knew you'd come back tonight," she says. "I knew you'd need to be in control of something."

"Nadia—"

"I'm not fighting you, Ezra." Her voice is flat but not unkind. "I've been too tired to fight anyone for three years. Come in."

I step inside.

She closes the door and turns to face me and for a moment neither of us says anything. Then she walks to the kitchen counter, picks up a manila envelope I didn't see this morning, and holds it out to me.

"Before you say anything," she says, "you should probably read that first."

I take it. My name is on the front in her handwriting.

"What is this?"

She looks at me steadily.

"It's the reason I left.”