Novels by Zieey

MARCUS I answered her the only way I knew how, no script, no safety net. Just the truth, raw and direct. "We find out who we are when there's nothing left to fight about," I said. "I'd like to do that with you."She held my gaze across the kitchen table for a long, searching moment. The air between us felt suddenly thinner.Then she said, "Okay." Simple and certain. It landed in my chest like a quiet earthquake.When I told Lena that Nadia had said yes, she just nodded once and asked about the garden seating arrangement. That was her way, no big speeches, just forward motion. Everything would be fine. She didn’t need to say it out loud.I picked Nadia up at noon. She was already waiting at the door, coat buttoned, bag slung over her shoulder, carrying that particular look of someone who had made a decision and was now quietly bracing for whatever came next."It’s going to be loud," I warned her."I assumed." A small flicker in her eyes. Nerves, maybe, or anticipation."Evan will as

I called Caleb from Nadia’s kitchen, the phone pressed too tightly to my ear. She had already slipped into the other room without a word, giving me the space she knew I needed. She’d learned the shape of my silences faster than most people ever did.He answered on the second ring."Marcus." His voice was sharp, and alert. It was past ten, and I knew he hadn’t been sleeping properly since that photograph arrived."I have the letter here," I said. "I’ll read you the parts that matter.""Go ahead."I read them slowly, each line landing like a stone dropped into still water. The admission, the calculated planting of the rumour. The way she had aimed straight for Harper’s existing fear. And then the final, brutal line: “He’ll never forgive Caleb for something Caleb never did. And by the time either of them figures that out, it won’t matter.”The silence that followed stretched so long I pulled the phone away to check the connection."Caleb?""I’m here." His voice had dropped, quieter now,

NADIA The email arrived at nine fourteen on a Thursday morning. I read it four times before my brain let me believe it.The language was plain, formal, almost clinical. The conflict-of-interest review had concluded. The documented evidence of David Holt’s communications with Harper, the pre-built angle, and the surveillance file constituted a serious breach of editorial independence. My suspension was lifted, effective immediately, with a formal statement of support from the oversight board. I read it four times because I had spent three weeks bracing for the other outcome. The one that would quietly end everything I’d built.I sat at my kitchen table in yesterday’s clothes and read it a fifth time, the screen blurring slightly. By midmorning, three press freedom organisations had already issued public statements. My phone wouldn’t stop, notifications coming faster than I could clear them. Journalists I’d never met. Editors who’d ghosted me years ago. Old colleagues I’d lost touch

NADIA I hadn’t planned to confront him.The house key had been sitting in my bag for two years, passed to me during the messy unraveling of my parents’ separation. I kept meaning to return it. Every time I thought about it, something stopped me. On a Tuesday afternoon, I finally ran out of excuses.I drove over telling myself it was simple. I just had to drop it off, five minutes. No conversation. Just the key.He opened the door himself. That alone hit me. Harper Lane never answered his own door. There had always been someone else… staff, assistants, to keep the world at the right distance. Seeing him there, unguarded, felt like the first crack in the version of him I’d grown up with.He looked older. Not broken, exactly. The silver hair was still perfectly cut, the clothes still expensive. But the commanding density he used to carry, the weight that filled every room was gone. What remained was quieter, almost hollow. The legal proceedings had already begun carving themselves into h

My grandfather had never told this part of the story to anyone, not completely. The family knew the outline, the accusation, the separation, and the long road back. It had been passed down with the sharpest edges filed smooth so it wouldn’t cut the next generation. But what Caleb told me that night still had edges. And they drew blood. He set the photograph on the side table and stared at the wall for a long moment, not lost in memory but deciding. Weighing how much truth a man could hand to his great-grandson without breaking something. Then he spoke, and the words cost him.“She understood me better than I understood myself.”He let that sit, heavy between us.“Sienna knew what I was afraid of. I grew up watching my father’s affair nearly destroy my parents. I had spent my whole life terrified of being deceived by someone I loved.” His voice thinned, a crack I had never heard before. “She knew that. She had been close enough, long enough, to know exactly which door to walk through.

MARCUS JR Nadia laid the photographs on the table one by one, silent. No explanation, no warning. Just the quiet slap of each print against the wood. I stared at them and felt something cold uncoil in my chest, deeper than anger, heavier. The sickening weight of realizing the betrayal had started long before I ever suspected it. That it had been there from the first day, patient and calculating.Nadia at the community site on day two. Shot from across the street with a long lens. She was looking down at her notes, completely unaware, the early-morning light catching the side of her face. Timestamp in the corner before the café, before the storm, before she had ever spoken to me.Nadia outside Mrs. Okafor’s building. Nadia on the park bench beside Mr. Babatunde, his grandson, a small blur in the background. Nadia at the Adeniran building, hand raised to the intercom. Every family. Every visit. Documented before Harper had any public reason to care.“He wasn’t managing the story,” I

I didn't sleep after Diana's call.I lay in the dark with Dominic breathing steadily beside me, the words looping relentlessly through my head.“Someone specifically flagged your name. Before Celeste ever came to your home.”I wasn't a casualty in someone else's plan. I was the plan.I lay there until the room turned gray with dawn, until my baby stirred and I carried him to the nursing chair. In that fragile early-morning quiet, with my son warm against my chest and the city slowly waking outside the window, I stopped turning over Celeste and holding companies and corporate rivals.I went somewhere else. I went back to the beginning.I fell in love with Dominic Sinclair on a Tuesday afternoon in a coffee shop that doesn't exist anymore.I've thought about that a lot lately. You can walk down that street now and find a pharmacy where it used to be. No trace left. No marker. Just a place that became something else while nobody was paying attention. That's how it is with most things th

I drove home from Nina's with the photograph burned behind my eyes. Celeste. Richard Holt. Eighteen months ago. That comfortable, familiar lean between them that didn't look like a first meeting. It looked like two people who already shared secrets nobody else was supposed to know about.I sat in the underground car park for a long time, engine off, Luca breathing softly in the back, and I thought.Every direct approach had failed. Confronting Dominic got me “insecure”. Asking about Celeste got me rehearsed answers. Reaching across the table got me nothing at all.Direct was the wrong tool. I got Luca out of the car seat, took the lift up, opened the front door, and smiled.Celeste was in the kitchen using my good ceramic teapot—the one I bought at a market years ago, the one I kept for myself. She looked up when I came in.“You were out early,” she said.“Just a walk.” I set my bag down, moved to the counter, completely unbothered. “Good morning?”She tilted her head. Just slightly

I didn't sleep that night.I sat in the nursing chair long after my baby settled, the door closed, the room swallowed in darkness, turning the same sharp images over and over in my mind until they cut deeper each time.The way Celeste stood in that doorway. The way she had looked at my son.Not with warmth. Not with the soft, involuntary pull that babies draw from almost anyone. No—this was measured and deliberate. Like she was studying something that already belonged to her. The memory sat cold in my stomach, refusing to loosen its grip.By morning the decision hardened inside me. I was going to talk to Dominic.Not about the messages. Not yet. Just about this—about a woman who was in our home for less than two weeks and was already standing outside my baby's room at nine at night like she had every right. I would stay calm and specific. I would say exactly what I saw and force him to respond.That was the plan.I waited until I heard the front door click shut behind Celeste at eig

"Nice to meet you," I said.The words tasted like ash. I stood frozen in my own entrance hall, Luca warm and heavy against my chest, a stranger’s expensive suitcase planted at my feet like it already belonged. I smiled anyway—the tight, automatic smile women learn when their mind is racing and their heart is trying not to scream. Celeste smiled back, warm and perfectly calibrated, the smile of someone who already mapped out every move. Maybe she had. I was still trying to catch up.Dominic showed her the east wing himself. I stayed behind in the kitchen, gripping the counter as their footsteps faded down the hallway—his low voice explaining something unnecessary, her soft, easy laugh drifting back. Not polite, not guest-like. Comfortable. The kind of laugh that comes from shared history, from inside jokes I wasn’t part of.I put the kettle on with hands that weren’t quite steady. I told myself it was nothing. I made one cup of tea. Not two.The first three days were almost tolerabl

I poured my heart out to Diana. Sitting there in the nursing chair with Luca warm and heavy against my chest, the morning light still thin and uncertain, I let it all spill out. The hair on his collar. The name that kept appearing. The fourteen messages. The hand that stayed limp under mine like dead weight. Five flat words in the dark, followed by the slow, even sound of him sleeping while I stared at nothing.For the first time. It sounded worse than I’d imagined. Diana didn’t speak right away when I finished. She wasn’t hunting for the right words—she always had them ready. She was simply letting mine settle, letting the weight of them press down on me so I couldn’t snatch them back.Then, quietly: “Meet me for coffee. Today.”“Diana, I have Luca—”“Bring him along. Today, Amara.”She was already at the table when I arrived.Diana Cross was forty-five and carried herself like someone who had stopped performing for rooms a long time ago. Silver threading through her natural hai

I did not sleep at all that night, not for one single minute, as those three messages continued to sit inside my chest like shards of glass. My baby finally cried out and gave me a reason to get up and move through the motions of another day.I got through the morning on pure autopilot, sustained only by my fierce love for my baby and the particular stubbornness of a woman who quietly decided that today would not be the day she allowed herself to fall apart completely.But somewhere between the six o’clock feeding and the nine o’clock nap, something inside me shifted in a way that felt both inevitable and terrifying. I was not yet ready to face the reality of Celeste or to pull on that dangerous thread and watch the rest of my life unravel, but the growing distance between us—the long weeks of careful politeness and a husband who moved through our shared home as though I was a stranger, that was something I believed I could still do something about if I tried.After my baby slept,

“It's a start.” Those two words carried everything I still couldn’t say aloud. He knew it, and I knew he knew it. And for now, we were both okay with the weight of what remained unspoken.He answered with a single word: “Good.”No pressure or rush to turn the start into something bigger before it was ready. Just “good”, spoken in that quiet, certain way of his that needed nothing more.I set my phone down and made breakfast, my hands steadier than they had any right to be.Things didn’t leap forward in grand declarations. They built, quietly, in small accumulations that felt dangerously real.Tuesday dinners became a rhythm. Not planned, not labeled—just something that kept happening because one of us would suggest it and the other would say yes. By the third week, Isla no longer treated his arrival like an occasion. She treated it like a Tuesday. When that shift settled in, I had to pause at the kitchen counter, gripping the edge for a second while something tight and hopeful twis

He was staying, and he was building, and hoping I’d want to be around him, and I sat there in the room I built from nothing, thinking that after everything we’d been through, we were finally speaking the same language.I had I’m around. Always. Nothing else. Not because I was pulling back—I was past that, or at least I was trying like hell to be—but because it was nearly midnight, I just ran a gala that lost its catering four hours before the doors opened, and I was sitting there in an emptying venue on nothing but adrenaline, exhaustion, and the heavy, bone-deep weight of a day that had asked for everything I had left to give. Something that big didn’t deserve a decision thrown together in a room like this at an hour like this.He heard it. I could see it land in him, quiet and careful, the way he let it settle without trying to grab for more than the moment was ready to offer. His shoulders eased just a fraction, like some tight thing inside him had finally been given permission t

Sebastian moved across the room toward me with clear purpose, like a man who had already decided exactly whose side he was on and was ready to stand there no matter what happened next.He reached me without any rush. That was how Sebastian always moved through a space—he never performed urgency or drama. He walked with the steady confidence of someone who knew where he wanted to be, and the room seemed to shift around him instead of the other way around. When he stopped beside me at the edge of the gala, he first looked over at Victor for a long moment, then turned his eyes to me."Are you alright?" he asked, his voice low and genuine."Yes," I said, and this time I truly meant it. Not the careful, managed answer I usually gave, but the real one. I was standing in a room I built from nothing, and Victor Hale was there on the edge of it, looking smaller and more diminished than I had ever seen him before. He tried to stop all of this from happening, but here it was—more complete an

Someone tried to pull my catering four hours before my biggest event. I had a contact list, an emergency plan, and zero intention of letting it break me."Priya," I said, voice tight. "Phone out."She already had it in her hand.I called my secondary catering contact—a smaller firm I worked with twice before, sharp on execution. The kind of owner who answered on Saturday mornings because he knew events didn’t wait for Monday. He picked up on the third ring."Ms. Reed.""I have a situation," I said, the words steady but my pulse hammering. "Gala tonight. The primary vendor pulled this morning. Can you cover it?"A short pause. I could almost hear him weighing risk against loyalty."Guest count?" he asked."Two-eighty confirmed. Possibly three hundred.""Menu?""Sending it now. Some items will need adjusting based on what you can source in—" I glanced at my watch, stomach twisting—"three and a half hours."He didn’t deflect. I heard the quiet calculation in the silence, a professional d

He was thinking about giving up his family empire, and he was telling me about it in an empty venue on a Saturday morning. I was either the right person to tell or the reason he was considering it. I needed to know which, I needed it like air.I asked him directly. No careful cushioning, no soft edges. The question mattered too much for anything else.“Which is it?” I said. “Am I the right person to tell because you trust me? Or am I the reason you’re considering it?”He looked at me. He didn’t rush. That was one of the things I had come to know about him, he never rushed the truth. He sat with the question, turning it over fully before he spoke. The pause wasn’t hesitation. It was respect.“Both,” he said.I waited, heart steady but loud in my chest.“And that’s not a bad thing,” he added, his voice low and certain. He held my gaze with that quiet steadiness that meant he was all in. “You’re not a factor I’m balancing. You’re not something I’m running toward or away from.” A breath.

Isla’s statement was dropped on Thursday. By Friday it had already reached farther than Victor’s whole press campaign ever did. My daughter had done in four hundred words what I’d been grinding away at for months.I watched it unfold from my desk, not obsessively, I still had work, but Sandra’s updates kept coming in steady waves. By Friday noon the picture was unmistakable. Isla’s words were spreading the way real things do: slower at first, then deeper, passed hand to hand between people who recognized truth when they saw it. They weren’t just reading; they were feeling it and sending it on to whoever else needed to hear it.A sixteen-year-old telling the plain, unvarnished story of her own life, no performance, no agenda. Just honesty. And people responded to that. They shared it because it trusted them to understand without being told how.Victor’s version of events was getting crowded out. Not in some explosive showdown. Just quietly, and steadily, the way something real sits ne