Chapter 35
AVERY
Nadiyah opens the door to her second-floor apartment and motions me inside with a small nod.
Sami darts in first, his small feet quick on the worn hardwood, heading straight for an elderly woman asleep on the sofa in the main room.
The woman startles awake as the little boy throws himself into her lap.
Her arms come down around him, loving and warm.
She's dressed in a worn cardigan over a modest housedress.
A headscarf covers most of her gray hair, which is pulled back from her face in a modest style similar to Nadiyah's.
She looks up toward the open apartment door where Nadiyah and I stand.
And then her gaze finds me.
The softness in her face vanishes. Her dark eyes widen, her lips part, and for a moment she looks at me with an expression I can't quite name.
Surprise? Recognition? Her attention snaps to Nadiyah, and a stream of words pours out in a language I don't understand.
Not French. Something with rougher edges and rising cadences.
The syllables tumble over each other, urgent and fast.
Nadiyah responds in the same language, her tone clipped. Clearly dismissive.
But the older woman doesn't stop. Her voice rises, hands lifting in sharp gestures. Whatever she's saying, she's upset and vocal about it.
Nadiyah cuts her off with a single curt phrase.
The older woman's mouth presses into a thin line, her jaw tight. In the silence that follows, her shoulders sag. Her eyes drop to the floor. Nadiyah stands perfectly still.
The older woman rises from the sofa. Without looking at me again, she reaches for Sami's hand and practically pulls him along with her. The boy glances back over his shoulder as she draws him toward the hallway, his brow furrowed, but he goes without protest.
A moment later, a door closes somewhere in the back of the apartment. A lock clicks into place.
"My mother." Nadiyah's tone is apologetic, her cheeks still flushed from the argument. "She watches Sami when I'm working. A blessing for a single mother, although we don't always agree on everything." She gestures toward the vacated sofa. "Please. Sit."
I move farther inside, but remain standing, my purse strap slung over my shoulder.
The exchange I just witnessed sits oddly in my chest. The grandmother's face when she saw me, the urgency in her voice, the disapproving way she looked at her daughter.
But families argue. Mothers and daughters disagree. It doesn't have to mean anything.
Nadiyah tilts her head. "Can I offer you some tea, perhaps?"
"That's very kind, but I really can't stay long. I have more appointments this morning, and Nick is expecting me at his office for lunch. If I could just see the pearls, I'll get out of your way."
"Of course." She bobs her head, a placid expression on her face. "Let me get them for you. One moment."
She disappears through a narrow doorway into what must be the kitchen, and I'm left alone in the quiet apartment.
The space is small, but every inch of it has been considered.
Lace curtains filter the soft morning light across walls that could use fresh paint but have been scrubbed clean.
The furniture is modest but well-kept. The upholstered sofa, a small wooden end table holding a lamp with a delicate crocheted lace doily beneath it, two cozy chairs that don't quite match but have been arranged to suggest they do.
Near the window, a compact work desk holds the tools of Nadiyah's craft.
I drift toward it without thinking, drawn by the meticulous order on display.
Spools of thread arranged in precise gradations—cream to ivory to pale gold to deep amber—each one in its designated spot.
A magnifying lamp with an articulated arm, positioned just so.
Tiny compartments holding seed pearls sorted by size, glass beads organized by color, needles of varying gauges laid out in a row.
They are the instruments of someone who creates beauty with her hands. Someone who finds peace in precision. Who takes pride in the work even when the workspace is cramped, the building is old, and the view from the window is nothing special.
I step closer, and my gaze catches on the beautiful silk scarf draped over the back of one chair—Hermès, unmistakable from the discreet logo near the hand-rolled hem.
It's out of place amid the rest of Nadiyah's belongings.
But there are other small, expensive items that hint at better times.
Porcelain figures on the small fireplace mantel.
Silver vases gleaming atop a stunning sideboard that looks like hand-hewn teak.
Things from another life, maybe. Objects that speak of wealth, of taste, of a woman who once had access to finer things than this cramped apartment in Chelsea.
"When did you move to New York?" I ask, curious now.
From the kitchen comes the soft sound of a drawer opening, then a pause. "It will be eight months in November."
Eight months. About as long as she's been at House of Delaire.
During one of my early consultations with Serena, not long after I'd commissioned her to make my wedding dress, she mentioned that she'd hired a master embroiderer.
I remember thinking how lucky we were to have Nadiyah working on my veil.
I drift toward a small bookcase against the far wall.
Framed photographs fill the shelves, clustered together with care.
The arrangement itself tells a story. The way certain frames are angled toward each other, the hierarchy of placement.
Which images have been given pride of position at eye level, which have been tucked to the sides.
The first photograph catches my attention immediately.
Nadiyah. Perhaps ten years younger, maybe more.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, catching the light.
Her face is transformed by a smile I've never seen on her.
Open. Radiant. Incandescent with joy, with the glow of a vibrant woman I hardly recognize as the withdrawn, unreadable craftswoman I've known for the past several months.
Beside her stands a man.
He's much older—thirty years her senior, at least. Silver hair, distinguished features, the bearing of a man accustomed to wealth and power. His arm is wrapped around Nadiyah's waist, proprietary and proud, and she's leaning into him with the easy intimacy of absolute belonging.
A wedding band glints on his left hand.
I look at her left hand in the photograph. No ring.
My eye drifts to another photograph, this one with Nadia holding a newborn.
Sami. He had same dark curls, the same watchful eyes even then.
The older man is in this photo too, seated beside Nadiyah and gazing at the infant with unmistakable tenderness.
One of his arms is draped over Nadiyah's shoulders.
His other hand is gentle on that small body nestled against its mother.
Still no ring on Nadiyah's finger. She was his mistress.
The realization builds piece by piece as I study the photographs.
This man—wealthy, distinguished, married—and Nadiyah loved him.
She gave birth to his child. Built a life in the margins of his, in the spaces between his real obligations, in the hours he could steal away from whoever wore the ring that matched his.
Where is he now?
The photographs feel like shrines. Preserved moments of a happiness that exists only in the past tense.
The frames are spotless, the glass clean.
She tends them, polishes them. Probably looks at them every single day and remembers what it felt like to be that woman in the golden light, smiling like the world had finally given her everything she wanted.
The apartment has gone quiet around me. No sound from the kitchen. Just stillness, stretching longer than it should for a woman retrieving a package of pearls. I step back from the photographs, suddenly aware of how deep into Nadiyah's private world I've wandered.
"I had a beautiful life once." Nadiyah's voice floats out from the kitchen, and I turn from the photographs.
Her tone has shifted. Distant now, almost dreamy, as though she's speaking to herself as much as to me. "I had a man who loved me. Omar gave me a good life, a soft life, filled with fine things. And he gave me Sami. It wasn't a perfect life, like yours, but I was happy."
A drawer closes in the kitchen. "Does Dominic Baine ever speak to you about his acquisitions, Avery?"
The question feels inappropriate, unsettling. It's too pointed. And the way she refers to Nick by his full name, the strange distancing of it, makes the fine hairs at the back of my neck prickle. What's taking Nadiyah so long to retrieve the package of pearls I'm supposed to look at?
"I'm not sure what you mean," I reply, confused, even though my senses sharpen on Nadiyah, attuned to every move and breath I hear coming from the area of the kitchen.
I glance at the apartment door, now easily ten steps across the room from me.
There's a part of me that suddenly regrets this detour to Nadiyah's place.
Although she's been nothing but polite since I bumped into her at the art center, something about her now—something about this whole situation—feels wrong.
Instinct sends my hand into my purse, searching for my phone. I should let Nick know where I am. For my own peace of mind as much as his. I swipe open the screen. Start typing a text to him.
Nadiyah's voice sounds from within the kitchen again. "Has he ever told you the true cost of all he has amassed for himself… and for you?"
The soft scuff of her footsteps over linoleum spikes my disquiet as she starts to return to the living room.
My pulse kicks against my throat. I hit send on my unfinished text. Drop my phone back into my bag.
At the same moment, Nadiyah steps out of the kitchen. Her eyes are fixed on me. She moves to stand in front of the apartment door—my only way out—and positions herself there with her hands behind her back.
I don’t need to see to know it’s not a package of pearls.
"I wonder," she says quietly, "how much will be enough for Dominic Baine."
My heart hammers, the beat of it high in my temples. "Nadiyah, what's this about?"
"Men like him." She ignores my question, takes a step toward me. The light catches her face, and I see it now—the grief carved into the lines around her eyes. It’s hollowed her out and filled her back up with something harder.
"They build their fortunes without ever stopping to consider the wreckage they leave behind.
Other men's dreams. Other men's lives." Another step.
"Do you ever wonder about the people who lost so that he could win? "
"Nick isn't like that." The words come automatically, defensive of the man I love. In the past, maybe he would have fit her unflattering description. But that's not who he is now. I've watched him change. I've held him through the pain of that change. "Whatever you think you know about him—"
She cuts me off with a sharp scoff. "Has he ever mentioned Omar al-Hassan?"
The name is distantly familiar.
I know it from somewhere.
A name Nick mentioned once? Or something I overheard in passing, Nick on the phone with Beck maybe. The Al-Hassan property in Dubai. A family hotel.
Yes, that’s it. The overseas deal Nick closed around the time we first met.
The one that ended in tragedy, with the aging patriarch who threw himself off the roof rather than watch his legacy pass into someone else's hands.
My blood goes cold.
Nadiyah makes a small, satisfied sound. "I see that he has mentioned my Omar before.
" Her smile is gentle, yet chilling. "He was the man in those photographs.
The father of my son. The love of my life.
" Her voice doesn't break, but something in it splinters.
"Dominic Baine destroyed him. He destroyed everything we had. "
I shake my head. Not at the accusation, but at what I see in her face now. Anguish so deep it has eaten through everything else. Through reason. Through restraint. Through whatever kept her civil these past months while she stitched those thousands of pearls into my wedding veil.
I take a step forward. "This stops right now, Nadiyah. I'm leaving."
She brings her hands around to the front of her.
A gun glints black and compact in her hand.
The wrongness of the weapon—here, in this apartment with the lace curtains and the crocheted doily and the photographs of a family—registers before anything else does. Then the barrel. Leveled at my chest.
"No." Her voice is soft. Almost apologetic. "I'm sorry, Avery. I can't allow that."
Everything stops.
My breath. My thoughts. The blood in my veins turning to something thick and slow. The room narrows to the gun and the closed door behind her and the distance between us—six feet, maybe seven—and the absolute certainty that I will not make it.
My legs want to move. Every muscle is coiled to charge, screaming to shove past her, to run.
But the baby.
The baby stops me. The fragile life inside me. The tiny heartbeat I can still hear after the first time in my doctor’s office. That changes everything.
I can't run. I can't risk a wrong move, a misfire, this woman's finger twitching on that trigger. Not with my child between me and whatever happens next. There has to be another way. Something I can say, some crack in her resolve I can reach.
"Please, Nadiyah." My voice comes out steady. Barely. "You don't have to do this."
Something moves across her face. Sorrow, maybe. Regret. But her grip doesn't waver. She shifts her position, moving with terrible care. Her gaze stays on me as she uses one hand to open the apartment door.
Gesturing with the gun, she directs me to step forward.
"Walk out slowly." Her voice is flat. Resolved. "Do not try to run."
I swallow the knot lodged in my throat and take a step. Then another. Measured. Deliberate. All of my focus on the woman behind me. On her breathing, the soft scrape of her shoes on the floor, the gun I can no longer see but know is there.
Oh, God… Nick. I pray he got my text, that he’ll understand the half-finished message. That he'll know something is wrong. He'll come.
I hold on to that hope. Hold on to him—the way I always have, the way he's always found me, every time the world tried to pull us apart.
I move through the open door. Step into the dim hallway.
Nadiyah follows close behind. The gun presses against my spine, hidden from view but unmistakably there.
I pause once we're outside the apartment, uncertain where she means to take me.
"Through that door," she says, indicating the fire exit stairs. "We're going up."