Monday

Monday, 9:47 A.M.

"and based on Q3 projections, we're looking at a fourteen percent return on the restructured portfolio, which puts us ahead of the Meridian benchmark by nearly two points."

Nia kept her voice steady as she advanced to the next slide. The conference room at Calloway & West was exactly the kind of space that made clients feel like their money was in careful hands high ceilings, clean lines, a view of the West Loop that cost more per square foot than most people's monthly rent. She had given this particular presentation four times in the past two weeks, and she could have delivered it in her sleep, which was fortunate, because her phone had just lit up on the table in front of her with a news alert whose headline she had read and immediately stopped reading.

She did not look at it again. She advanced the slide.

"The allocation strategy we're recommending accounts for three risk scenarios," she continued, moving to the left of the screen. "Conservative, which keeps the existing structure largely intact. Moderate, which redistributes approximately thirty percent of the portfolio toward the growth sectors we outlined in section two. And what we're calling the *accelerated* model, which"

The door opened.

Marcus West, the firm's founding partner, leaned in with the particular expression he used when he was about to ruin someone's morning and had already come to terms with it. He was sixty-two years old and had built this company from a one-room office in Wicker Park into a forty-person operation with seventy million under management. Nia had never once seen him interrupt a client presentation.

"Nia," he said. "I need a moment."

The clients, two executives from a regional logistics company, looked between them with the cautious attention of people who understood that what was happening had nothing to do with them. Nia handed her laser pointer to her junior associate, said, "Jamie will walk you through sections four and five. I'll be right back," and followed Marcus into the hallway with the same unhurried pace she used for everything.

She closed the door behind her.

"Tell me," she said.

Marcus looked at her for a moment in the way people look at someone they respect and are about to deliver news to that they suspect she already knows. "Ashford Group filed an acquisition announcement forty minutes ago," he said. "We're the acquisition."

"I know." She had seen the alert. "When?"

"Seventy-two hours. The deal was finalized last Thursday. I was under a confidentiality agreement until the announcement went public." He had the decency to look uncomfortable about that. "The all-hands is at two."

Nia nodded once. "I'll finish the presentation."

"Nia"

"I'll finish the presentation, Marcus." She looked at him evenly. "The Henriksen Group didn't drive forty minutes to sit in a conference room watching us process acquisition news. Let me close this meeting and then we can discuss whatever needs discussing."

He studied her for another moment, then nodded and stepped back. She turned, opened the conference room door, and walked back to the front of the room.

"Apologies for the interruption," she said, picking up the laser pointer from Jamie. "The accelerated model. Here's what it does."

She got through the remaining twenty minutes on muscle memory and professional pride, answered three questions that she answered well, shook hands with both executives, and waited until the elevator doors closed before she allowed herself to lean against the nearest wall and take a breath that was longer than was probably visible to anyone passing through the hallway.

*Ashford Group.*

There were approximately twelve hundred private equity firms operating in this country. There were dozens within the Midwest alone. The probability that any given acquisition at any given moment would involve the specific company whose name she had spent four years conditioning herself to process without reaction was, objectively, very small.

She had been operating under the assumption that small probabilities were the same as impossible ones. She was now revising that assumption.

Her phone buzzed. Imara.

She answered it before the second vibration. "Not now."

"Nia." Imara's voice had the specific, deliberate calm of someone who had already passed through an alarm and arrived at crisis management. "Tell me you knew."

"I didn't know."

"Tell me you're calm."

"I'm calm."

"Tell me the truth."

Nia closed her eyes for exactly two seconds. "I'm working on it."

"I'm coming to your office at noon."

"There's an all-hands at two."

"I know. I'm coming at noon. Do not make any decisions before I get there." A pause. "Nia."

"I hear you."

"Do you?"

"Yes. I'll see you at noon." She ended the call and put her phone in her pocket and stood in the hallway for another moment, looking at nothing in particular. Then she went back to her desk, opened her laptop, and worked until eleven-fifteen without stopping.

She picked Seren up at three-thirty from Miss Keller's preschool, because Nia had texted Rowan at two-forty-five and he had rearranged his afternoon, and when she walked into the pickup area and saw her daughter's face turn toward her with that particular lighting-up that Seren reserved specifically for her mother and for the prospect of goldfish crackers, something that had been tight in her chest since nine-forty-seven loosened in a way that was not resolution but was close enough to function as one.

"You came," Seren said, as though this were a pleasant surprise rather than a daily occurrence.

"I always come." Nia crouched down to her level and straightened her daughter's jacket, which was, as usual, half-off. "How was your day?"

"Micah cried at snack time."

"That's sad. Why did Micah cry?"

Seren considered this with the philosophical weight of someone who had given it genuine thought. "He didn't want the orange crackers. He wanted the yellow ones." She paused. "I gave him my yellow ones."

Nia looked at her daughter four years old, small for her age, with a mass of dark curls and eyes that were the precise color of a winter sky right before it decided what kind of weather it was going to be and felt the particular variety of love that does not diminish under pressure but instead becomes more solid, more structural, more load-bearing.

"That was kind of you," Nia said.

"I know," Seren agreed, and held out her hand.

They walked to the car. Seren asked three questions about what was for dinner, one question about whether clouds had feelings, and one question about a dog they passed on the sidewalk whose name turned out to be Gerald. Nia answered all of them. By the time she had Seren buckled into her car seat and the radio on low and the familiar stretch of North Lincoln Avenue moving past the windows, the tight thing in her chest had loosened another degree.

She could do this. She had done harder things. She had sat in a lawyer's office at twenty-four years old and signed papers that ended a marriage while three weeks pregnant and no one in that room had known, and she had walked out of the building into a September afternoon and driven to a new city and built a new life with the specific, ferocious competence of someone who had decided that grief was something you scheduled, not something you surrendered to.

She had been doing it for four years. She could keep doing it.

*The all-hands was at two,* she thought. He might not even be there. Companies send representatives. Acquisition teams. This doesn't have to mean

"Mama," Seren said from the back seat. "You went quiet."

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

Nia glanced in the rearview mirror. Her daughter was looking at her with an expression of genuine inquiry, chin slightly tilted, the way she looked when she was paying close attention.

"About dinner," Nia said.

Seren accepted this without argument, which was unusual enough that Nia suspected she didn't entirely believe it. For a four-year-old, she had a remarkably sophisticated instinct for what was and wasn't the full truth.

She got that from someone. Nia had a very specific idea of whom.

She turned onto their street and pulled into the parking spot that she technically wasn't supposed to have reserved but had negotiated for when she moved in, because she was Nia Calloway and she did not leave the variables she could control to chance. Upstairs, there was a meal prepped in the refrigerator, a slightly chaotic living room, and a bedtime routine that Seren treated as a serious ceremonial event. There was a life here that was good and real and entirely her own construction.

There was also, tucked in a folder at the back of the second drawer of her home desk, a document she had never needed to use and had never been able to throw away.

A birth certificate.

Father's name: Darian Cael Ashford.

She had listed him because she had been twenty-four years old and honest to a fault and unable to write a lie on a legal document even when the lie would have been significantly more convenient.

She had told herself she

would address it someday.

Someday, it appeared, had acquired a timeline.

"Come on, baby," she said, and got out of the car.