All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Hidden Heir : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

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

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

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