27. Ethan #2
We are building something dangerous—carefully, precisely, relentlessly.
Mason doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t need answers to.
He’s all edges and dead focus, his voice clipped but sharp, cutting through the threads of Daniel Holt’s life with surgical precision.
We piece together a network that’s bloated with corruption and tied together with unregistered donations, fake wellness grants, and medical shell corporations with more secrets than staff.
What began as a private trial cover-up now blooms into something deeper, uglier.
There’s evidence of falsified prescriptions pushed through small-town clinics, facilities shut down after patient complaints, payments rerouted through charitable arms that no longer exist.
Mason tracks everything. I follow his lead where it counts. But when it comes to motive, when it comes to why this matters, that part’s mine.
Daniel Holt might have started as a man I hated for what he did to Ivy. But now? Now I want him buried under the weight of everything he built.
And still, through all of it, I come home to her.
I catch her staring out the window once, the curve of her hand brushing against her stomach like it’s second nature now, like the motion belongs to something primal and quiet.
I watch her from the doorway, pretending I’m just passing through, but I see how her shoulders rise and fall slowly, how her head tips like she’s trying to listen for something only she can hear.
I want to go to her. I want to tell her I remember what she said about it being a girl. That I can already see that child’s future in her—the strength, the softness, the fire.
But I don’t. Because the memory of her silence is louder than anything she could say.
And yet it doesn’t stop me.
It doesn’t stop me from folding blankets neatly outside her door.
From pausing outside the bathroom when I hear her throw up again.
From Googling prenatal massage therapists at midnight just to see what’s nearby in case she ever mentions her back is sore.
It doesn’t stop me from feeling something raw and dangerous when I see her yawn and realize she hasn’t slept, or from brushing my hand across the thermostat just to make sure it’s warm enough for her when I leave before dawn.
What it does, though, is hurt. It hurts in the silent spaces between what we were and what we are now. It hurts in the way I want her and cannot reach for her. And it hurts every time I wonder how many moments like this I missed before she told me the truth.
The lights in the apartment dim as evening bleeds toward night.
She’s still working, her fingers dancing across the keys, her hair pulled up and slightly askew.
I stare at her too long, then force myself to move, to breathe, to walk down the hall and leave her alone before I do something reckless like fall at her feet and ask her to lie to me again just to make this ache stop.
I leave her be and go to my room instead, dark now except for the thin spill of city light that filters in through the windows, casting silver streaks across the walls like scratches on a mirror.
I lie flat on my back, one arm slung over my eyes, breaths shallow and uneven, trying to quiet the storm still grinding against my ribs.
The room is too warm, the sheets too tangled, the thoughts in my head too sharp to dull.
I keep waiting for the anger to fade, for the hurt to harden into something useful, but all I can feel is this slow, dragging ache that pulls at everything I touch.
The phone buzzes once against the side table.
Unknown number.
I stare at it for a second, considering letting it ring out. Then, without thinking, I swipe to answer, holding the phone to my ear like it might bite.
“Hello.”
There’s a pause, and then a voice I don’t expect. Familiar. Female. Not Ivy.
“You’re really going to screw this up, huh?”
I sit up fast, swing my legs over the edge of the bed, my voice coming out rough. “Cassie?”
“I figured that tone meant you weren’t too drunk to listen,” she says, dry and direct, like she hasn’t just called me out of nowhere in the middle of the night. “Good. Because I don’t feel like repeating myself.”
I press the heel of my hand against my temple, eyes closed. “What is this, exactly?”
“This is me calling because Ivy is miserable,” she says, voice flattening now, losing the sarcasm. “And I don’t mean teary or dramatic or curled-in-a-ball sad. I mean broken. Hollowed out. Like she’s trying to carry something she doesn’t know how to name anymore.”
Something inside me twists, tight and guilty.
“She lied,” I mutter, too quiet for the edge I wanted behind the words. “She let me believe?—”
“She let you believe because she was terrified,” Cassie snaps. “You ever stop to think about that? She didn’t lie because it was easy. She lied because trauma doesn’t let you think in straight lines. Because sometimes, telling the truth feels like more of a risk than staying quiet.”
“I’m not Daniel,” I say, sharper now.
“No, you’re not,” she agrees. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t afraid of losing you. Of ruining the only thing that felt safe after being with someone who made her question everything she thought she knew about love.”
The silence stretches between us.
“How long have you known?” I ask.
Cassie sighs. “Since yesterday. I met her for lunch and she finally let it spill. Said she wished she’d told you sooner. That it was eating her alive.”
My throat goes dry. I press my fingers to my eyes, breathing slowly and heavily.
“She didn’t even blame you for walking away,” Cassie says. “She said you were the only man she’d ever felt safe with. That you were the first thing that made her feel like maybe she could start over.”
The guilt hits me like a slow wave, dragging through every decision I’ve made since I found out. My anger. My silence. The cold way I left her standing in the hall. The part of me that still wanted to protect her even when I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask, though I already know.
Cassie’s voice softens. “Because when someone’s breaking, you don’t keep pulling them apart. Especially not if you love them.”
I sit there long after the call ends, the words echoing in my skull like a slow burn through bone. I don’t move right away. I don’t speak. I just let the weight of what she said settle into my chest until I can finally stand, until I can finally make my legs move.
The hallway is silent when I step out of the bedroom. The apartment thrums with quiet domestic life, lights low, the smells of chamomile and lavender lingering faintly in the air like she tried to calm herself and failed.
I find her on the couch, knees drawn to her chest, her face bathed in the pale glow of the television.
Some old sitcom flickers in front of her, laugh track playing on a loop, but she isn’t laughing.
She isn’t even watching. She’s just there, wrapped in a knit blanket too big for her, eyes glassy, staring into the distance like she’s forgotten how to move.
She looks up when she hears me, startled. Her lips part like she wants to say something, but no sound comes.
And before I can think better of it, I walk to the couch and sit beside her.
She doesn’t move at first, and I don’t look at her.
I stare at the screen, at the ridiculous colors, the laugh lines of strangers who don’t know what it is to be this tired, this full of unsaid things.
I should get up. I should give us both the space we keep pretending we need.
But then her head leans against my shoulder, tentative, careful.
Her hair is soft against my jaw, her body a warm line beside mine, and even though everything in my chest still aches with the wreckage of what we’ve been through, the moment stretches between us like a thread pulled taut.
I let her stay and allow myself to feel all of it. I let the guilt and the love and the helpless ache blur together until it’s just her breath near my neck, the curve of her against my ribs, the steady thud of something unspoken trying to rise between us.
There’s no telling what happens tomorrow or if we’ll survive this.
But right now, in this stillness, in this fractured calm, she is here and I am not walking away.
The screen is bright, and the hero and heroine are waltzing beneath a paper moon to the swell of some cheerful track, the kind that promises everything will be fine in twenty-two minutes or less, but none of it holds my attention.
All I can feel is Ivy’s warmth pressed into me and how much I yearn for this to become what it should be.