Nadia's POV
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My phone buzzes again.
Seventeen missed calls. All from Dad.
I stare at the screen until the numbers blur. I don't call back. Not yet. I can't open my mouth right now without something coming out that I won't be able to put back.
So I sit here on this cold hospital floor in my nicest dress and I count.
That's what I do when everything is falling. I count. I make lists. I do the math. It keeps my hands from shaking and my chest from caving in.
Okay. Math.
Rent is due in eleven days. I have enough for that. Barely. Mom's next surgery payment — the one the hospital called about three times this week — is due in six days. I do not have enough for that. Not even close. Dad's business account, the one that was supposed to cover it, has been frozen since Monday. He didn't tell me why. He just stopped answering clearly and started answering in half-sentences that didn't connect to each other.
And Ethan.
My husband.
I stop counting when I get to Ethan.
An hour ago, I was in a bathroom two hallways from here, alone, doing the hardest thing I have ever done in my twenty-nine years of life. Something I never planned. Something I never wanted to do alone. I kept waiting for the door to open. For footsteps. For someone who loved me to show up and say I'm here, I've got you, you don't have to do this alone.
The door never opened.
He didn't come.
He didn't even know I was here. I didn't tell him. Because three weeks ago, I found a text on his phone from a woman named Vanessa that told me everything I needed to know about my marriage. And I had been quietly carrying that information around like a stone in my chest, waiting for the right moment to deal with it.
There was no right moment. There never is.
So I dealt with today alone.
I press my back harder against the wall. The floor is cold through my dress. This is my nicest dress. I wore it today because I was going to surprise Ethan with an anniversary dinner. Seven years. I made a reservation at the restaurant where we had our first date. I bought the dress two weeks ago and hid it in the back of my closet like a secret.
I never made it to the restaurant.
His phone went to voicemail. Then again. Then I stopped trying.
I look down at my hands. They're steady. That surprises me. I feel like the inside of me is a building that just got hit by something enormous, but my hands are perfectly still. I think about what that means about me. I think maybe I've been preparing for this collapse longer than I realized. Maybe part of me knew and started building walls ahead of time, brick by quiet brick, so that when the hit came I'd still be standing.
I'm still standing. Technically. I'm sitting on a hospital floor, but you know what I mean.
My phone buzzes again.
I look at the screen.
Not Dad this time.
Ethan.
One text. Just one. After seventeen hours of silence, after everything, after today — one text.
We need to talk when you get home.
I read it four times. I notice he didn't ask where I was. He didn't ask if I was okay. He didn't say I've been worried or call me or any of the things a husband says when his wife has been unreachable for an entire day.
He just needs to talk.
I already know what he's going to say. I've known for weeks. The texts, the late nights, the way he stopped looking at me directly — I'm not stupid. I never was. I just loved him. There's a difference.
I put the phone face-down on my knee.
The hallway is quiet. A nurse walks past without looking at me. Someone's monitor beeps steadily from behind a closed door. I think about my mother, two rooms away, hooked up to machines, recovering from surgery she almost didn't survive. She asked me this morning if I was eating enough. She's lying in a hospital bed with tubes in her arm and she's asking about me.
That's Clara Holloway. That's my mother.
I will not let her lose this house, this care, this fighting chance — because of a debt I didn't create and a husband who was stealing my life with one hand while holding mine with the other.
I won't.
I pick up my phone and finally call Dad back.
He answers on the first ring, and the sound of his voice — broken in a way I have never heard before — almost cracks me open right there on the floor.
"Nadia." Just my name. Like he's relieved I exist.
"Tell me everything," I say.
He does.
By the time he's done, I understand why he couldn't say it in half-sentences. Because the full sentence is this: Holloway Industries — the company my grandfather built, that my father ran for thirty years, that was supposed to be our safety net — is gone. Sold off in a debt acquisition three days ago. Pennies on the dollar. Someone moved fast, filed the right paperwork, and by the time Dad understood what was happening, the signatures were already done.
Everything. Gone.
I sit with that for ten seconds. I let it land. Then I put it in the part of my chest where I'm storing things I'll feel later, when I can afford to.
"Okay," I say. "I'll figure it out."
"Nadia_"
"I'll figure it out, Dad."
I hang up.
I close my eyes.
I have eleven days until rent. Six days until Mom's payment. No backup. No husband who's actually a husband. No family business. No plan.
I open my eyes.
At the end of the hallway, the elevator doors slide open.
A man steps out. Tall. Dark coat. The kind of face that doesn't waste expressions. He moves like someone who has never once questioned whether he belongs in a room. He looks down at a piece of paper in his hand, then back up at the hallway — and his eyes stop.
On me.
I don't know why, but something in my stomach goes very still.
He starts walking toward me.
And that's when I notice the name on the folder tucked under his arm.
"Holloway."