CHAPTER FIVE
1123 Words
Nora's Pov
Ethan turned his phone face down and something in his expression closed off. Not completely. Just enough for me to notice the difference from thirty seconds before when he had been looking at me like we were actually in this together.
I didn't ask again.
I had learned a long time ago that pushing people toward honesty never worked. They told you when they were ready or they didn't tell you at all and either way you had to be prepared for both outcomes. So I finished my coffee and rinsed the cup and told him I was going to visit my mother that afternoon.
He nodded. He was already somewhere else in his head.
I picked up my bag and left.
The hospital was forty minutes away by cab. I made that trip every few days and each time the route felt shorter and the building felt heavier. My mother was in a private room now, that was new, arranged quietly through the contract settlement before I had even moved into the Blackwood building. I hadn't asked for it. It had just happened. I didn't know whether to be grateful or unsettled that Ethan's world had reached into this part of my life before I had even unpacked.
My mother was sitting up when I arrived. That was a good day sign. She smiled when she saw me and I sat beside her and she held my hand and looked at my face the way mothers do when they are reading something you haven't said yet.
"You look tired," she said.
"I'm fine."
"Nora."
"I'm managing, Mum. That's the same thing."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Helena called me yesterday."
I kept my expression still. "What did she say?"
"She said you were settling in well. That the Blackwoods were good people." She paused. "She seemed very focused on making sure I believed that."
I thought about Helena's signature on that document. I thought about Victor's voice in that hallway. I thought about the way Helena had exhaled when I signed my name.
"Did she say anything else?"
My mother looked at me carefully. "She asked if you had mentioned anything about the contract terms. Specifically the financial arrangements." She squeezed my hand. "Nora, what is going on?"
I looked at her, this woman who had given everything and asked for nothing and ended up in a hospital bed anyway. I was not going to put this on her. Not yet. Not until I understood the full shape of it myself.
"Helena is just being Helena," I said. "Don't worry about it."
My mother didn't look convinced. But she let it go because she was tired and because she trusted me and because sometimes love means accepting the answer someone gives you even when you know it isn't complete.
I stayed two hours. I read to her for a while from the book on her nightstand. When she fell asleep I sat there a little longer and let myself feel the full weight of what I was carrying before I folded it back up and put it away.
Then I took out my phone and called Marcus.
Marcus Hale had been my best friend since we were nineteen and broke and sharing bad coffee in a library during exam season. He was the person I called when I needed someone who would be honest without being cruel and who would not panic on my behalf before I had finished explaining.
He answered on the second ring.
"How bad is it," he said. Not a question. He already knew from my voice.
"Helena co-signed the debt that put me in this marriage. Victor Blackwood made a side arrangement with Camille's father using my presence in this house as leverage. And Camille sent Ethan a message this morning saying she knows something about me."
Silence.
Then — "What does Camille know about you?"
"I have no idea."
"Could it be something Helena told her?"
I stopped walking. I was outside the hospital now on the pavement and that question landed in a way I wasn't ready for. Helena and Camille had no obvious connection. They had no reason to communicate. But Helena had reasons for everything and Camille had been placed in Ethan's life deliberately by her own father and nothing about this situation had turned out to be what it appeared on the surface.
"I don't know," I said. "But I need to find out before Ethan meets with her."
"Are you going to tell him not to go?"
"I can't tell him anything. He's not on my side. He's just, adjacent to me right now."
"Nora." Marcus's voice dropped. "Be careful. You're in a house full of people who all have agendas and you're the only one who walked in without one."
"I know."
"Do you need me to come?"
"Not yet." I paused. "But stay available."
Ethan was gone when I got back. His jacket was missing from the hook near the door and his phone was not on the kitchen counter where he usually left it. I stood in the hallway for a moment and then I went to my room and changed and sat on the edge of the bed and thought.
Camille said she knew something about me. There were very few things to know. My life before this contract was not complicated, it was small and tired and honest. The only thing anyone could use against me was my mother and that debt and Helena. Everything pointed back to Helena.
I opened my laptop and went back to the debt document. I had read it twice already but this time I went further. Past the financial clauses, past the repayment structure, down to the final pages where the supplementary agreements were attached.
There was a sub-clause I had missed.
It was buried in the language of the guarantor section, deliberately worded to look like standard legal protection. But what it said, what it actually said when I stripped away the legal framing, was that if the marriage contract was voided within the first year for any reason, a portion of the Lane family's remaining assets transferred not to Blackwood Industries.
They transferred to Helena Lane directly.
I sat back.
Helena hadn't just co-signed the debt. She had engineered the entire structure so that if anything went wrong, if I failed, if the marriage collapsed, if Ethan walked away, she walked away with something. She had built herself a safety net out of my failure before I had even signed my name.
My phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number, no name. Just four words.
“Ask Ethan about Camille.”
- Writer
