They attempted a hostile takeover of his businesses, they accused him of illegal trade practices, they manufactured evidence that he was involved in human trafficking. He had known all along it would happen, but none of us anticipated it, and it hit Nevada the hardest. She was trying to do everything at once: help Rogan, build goodwill to make sure we were safe once the grace period was over, and earn money for us. Our business was mortgaged. We were in debt. The Houses didn’t have to attack us. They just didn’t hire us. We had to fight for every dollar.”
He was listening to me and the words just kept coming out.
“Nevada didn’t ask for help. She was going to fix it all herself. She’d been fixing things herself since she was seventeen, when she took over the business. She lost weight. She looked sick. We asked her to slow down. She said she would, but she didn’t. We went to Rogan. He asked her to stop. She promised she would but kept on going. She was trying desperately to make sure that all of us were okay.”
My heart was speeding up. Talking about it was like jumping into an ice-cold well full of anxiety and fear. You would think time would have dulled it, but no.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Arabella and I came home and found her facedown on the floor.” The memory slashed across reality, raw and charged with pure panic: Nevada prone in the hallway and Arabella’s bloodless face and the terrifying sound of her screaming.
“It was just like when we found out my father had cancer. Mom, Arabella, and I had gone school supply shopping and when we came back, he was passed out on the floor in the home office.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “What did you do?”
“We freaked out and called an ambulance.”
There was so much there that couldn’t be explained. The single thought running through my head on a loop, “Cancer, cancer, cancer . . .” Mom’s glassy eyes as she stared straight ahead, driving the car behind the ambulance; Arabella rocking back and forth in the hospital waiting room, hugging herself and mumbling, “My sister’s going to die. My sister’s going to die”; the waiting for the doctor; my cousins running into the waiting room, Leon freaked out and stuttering, Bern lost and somehow small; and finally, Rogan tearing through the hospital hallway like he was going to take the building down. That was the only time I’d ever seen fear on my brother-in-law’s face.
“Was she sick?”
“Yes. She had the flu. She hadn’t eaten in two days, she was dehydrated and running a fever, and she’d spent the night in the rain doing some bullshit surveillance.”
Violence didn’t come naturally to me, but at that moment I had wanted to grab Nevada by her shoulders and shake her until her head popped off.
“I’m glad you found her. I know it was terrible for you to see her that way, but you found her that way because you were supposed to. If you hadn’t, she would’ve done permanent damage to herself.”
Who are you, Alessandro Sagredo? Why did you walk into my life?
“We all told her she had to stop. She said she would take two weeks off. The hospital released her. Rogan carried her out to his car. It was terribly romantic.”
Alessandro raised his eyebrows. “How long?”
“Fourteen hours. I found her in the office going through case files the next morning. It’s like she was stuck in a hamster wheel and couldn’t get out. Talking to her was pointless. Everything I said just bounced off.”
“She knew you were right, but she didn’t think she was wrong.”
“Yes.” I sighed. “I realized that we had to act. Arabella had turned eighteen a couple of months before this happened. When our dad died, he was the sole owner of the agency and he split his shares equally between the three of us.”
“You voted her out of the business?” He glanced at me, the disbelief clear on his face.
“No! Of course not. Nevada took the agency over from Dad at its lowest point and built it back up. She’s the reason our bills were paid and there was food on the table. We could never lock her out.”
“Then what?”
“We took away her ability to financially contribute to the business.”
He laughed under his breath.
“She could take all the cases she wanted, she could use all of our resources, but instead of getting a set salary and letting the bulk of