Novels by Ernest

I stared at Julian’s text for a long time.Dana stirred on the couch behind me, pulling the blanket tighter without waking, and the city outside my window was doing that specific early-morning thing where the light was neither night nor day but something suspended between them, gray and provisional, waiting to decide what kind of day it intended to be.I typed back three words.Where and when.His reply came in under a minute, which meant he’d been sitting with his phone waiting, which meant he hadn’t slept either.My apartment. Seven tonight. I’ll be alone.I put the phone down and went to make coffee and tried to locate the version of myself who knew how to make a decision like this cleanly, without the old reflexes pulling in one direction and the new ones pulling in another.I couldn’t find her. So I made the coffee and sat with the uncertainty and decided that was allowed too.Catherine Holloway picked up on the second ring when I called her back at six.“I need twenty-four hours

I told the cab driver to pull over.Not because I had somewhere else to be — because I needed thirty seconds of stillness that wasn’t moving through traffic, wasn’t hurtling toward anything, wasn’t being carried forward by momentum I hadn’t chosen. I needed to sit completely still and decide who I was going to be in the next 13 minutes.“Dana,” I said. “Send me everything you have on Catherine Holloway. Right now.”“Already sending,” she said. “Evelyn — are you okay?”I thought about that question seriously, the way I’d been trying to think about all questions seriously lately instead of defaulting to the automatic fine I’d spent five years reflexively producing.“No,” I said. “But I’m not falling apart either. I’ll call you when I know more.”I hung up. Opened the files Dana had sent. Started reading.Catherine Holloway, sixty-one, was formerly a senior partner at a Manhattan corporate law firm before her retirement four years ago—Julian’s father’s younger sister. Apparently estrange

I walked back toward Julian’s car slowly, phone still in my hand, the alert still glowing on the screen between us like something neither of us had asked to be handed.“You saw it,” I said.“Just now,” he said. “Yes.”“Do you know who the second name is?”He looked at me for a long moment — that specific, measured look I’d spent five years learning to read, the one that meant he was choosing between what he knew and what he was ready to say.“No,” he said. “I don’t.”I believed him. That was the uncomfortable part. I looked at his face — genuinely confused, not performing confusion, not managing a reaction — and believed him completely, which meant whoever the second name was, it wasn’t someone Julian had been protecting.It was someone protecting themselves.“Get in the car,” I said. “Don’t go home yet.”He didn’t argue, which told me more about where he was than anything he’d said at the railing.Emotional Beat OneWe sat in the parking lot with the engine running and the heater on

I was out of my chair before Marcus finished the sentence.“Which side,” I said, already moving toward the elevator, coat in hand, Richard calling something after me I didn’t stop to hear. “Marcus. Which side of the bridge?”“The upper level parking area on the Jersey side,” he said. “His car pinged there four minutes ago. Evelyn, I’ve called 911 already but the dispatcher said—”“Keep trying his phone,” I said. “Don’t stop. I’m going.”I hung up and hit the lobby at a run.Emotional Beat OneThe cab ride took nineteen minutes and felt like a lifetime compressed into a series of traffic lights that had never seemed so deliberately, cruelly red.I sat in the back with my hands pressed flat against my thighs and tried to think clearly, tried to be the composed, strategic, self-possessed woman I’d spent the last month carefully constructing — and kept failing, because underneath all the construction was still the woman who’d sat beside Julian Holloway on a kitchen floor at 3am after his

I didn’t tell Richard about the conversation in the glass conference room. Not because I was hiding it, exactly — more because I didn’t yet know what to call it, and Richard had a way of needing things named before he could strategize around them.Three days passed. Quiet ones, mostly. I went to work, ran numbers, watched Van Corporation’s stock continue its slow, ugly slide on the screens lining our trading floor, and tried not to think too hard about a man in a glass room saying I want to learn how to be someone who doesn’t need you.I almost succeeded.On the fourth day, Patricia called me. My old supervisor at Mercer & Lane, a voice from a life that already felt like it belonged to someone else.“I saw the press conference,” she said, without preamble, the way she always did. “I wanted to say I’m proud of you. And I wanted to ask if you’d consider coming back to speak to my new hires sometime. About starting over. About what it actually takes.”“I’d like that,” I said, and meant i

I didn’t respond to Julian’s text for six days.Not out of strategy this time — I want to be honest about that, even if only with myself. I didn’t respond because I genuinely didn’t know what true thing I could say back that wouldn’t either reopen a door I’d worked hard to close, or slam it shut in a way I might later regret.So I said nothing, and went to work, and let the silence between us become its own kind of answer.The board review moved fast once the fraud allegations became official. Richard kept me updated in the clipped, efficient way he updated everyone — facts only, no editorializing — and through him I learned, in pieces, what was actually happening to the company I’d once quietly kept alive.Two more senior staff members resigned. The interim chairman started attending meetings Julian wasn’t invited to, a humiliation so specific and so total that even Richard, usually unmoved by Van Corporation’s suffering, paused for a second before delivering that particular update.