SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY

## CHAPTER 3

A pause. “You write things down every day. Their moods, what they ate, new sounds, sleep times.” “I leave it on the island in the mornings.” He was quiet. Then, “I’ve been reading them.” She turned. “I didn’t know if anyone was.” “I read them,” he said, and something in the way he said it was almost careful, like he was being precise about something that mattered. “Every morning.” She didn’t know what to do with that, so she said good night and went back to bed. But she lay awake for a while after, thinking about the look on his face before he’d heard her coming. The weight of a man who had lost something enormous and was still standing in his own kitchen at midnight, reading notes about whether his one-year-old daughter had eaten her peas. *This man is trying*, she thought. And that, she realized later, was when everything got complicated, when the careful line she’d drawn for herself between employer and something else entirely began, almost imperceptibly, to blur.

She had been there four months when a man named Harwick started appearing. She noticed him first at the park. A gray-haired man in a coat too heavy for the weather, sitting on a bench that didn’t face the playground. He wasn’t watching the children. He was watching the entry path. Selene had spent three years managing a classroom, which meant she had developed a very reliable sense for when something was wrong before she could articulate why. She turned the stroller around early that day and took a different route back. She mentioned it to the security lead, a man named Briggs, and she noted with a flash of unease that the name was on a list she’d seen once in a company briefing, though she couldn’t place why, and he took it seriously enough to increase the perimeter check on their morning routes. She didn’t mention it to Bastian. She probably should have.

Two weeks later, on a Tuesday morning in February, she was crossing the parking structure adjacent to the building when she heard the crack. One shot, one, but it was enough. She didn’t know where she’d been hit until she was lying on the ground with her body curled around the stroller and both twins screaming, and her own shoulder suddenly felt wrong in a way that was less pain and more absence, like the part of her that was supposed to be there had simply gone quiet. She kept her arms around the stroller. That was the thing she was most adamant about after, when everyone asked what she remembered. She had kept her arms around it the entire time. She hadn’t let go.

She woke up in a hospital room that was not a hospital room she had expected. Private, quiet, white curtains that moved slightly, even though the window wasn’t open. A monitor beeped at a cadence that was almost restful. Her left shoulder was bandaged tight, and her mouth tasted like anesthetic, and somewhere in the distance, she thought she could hear the sound of a child. Bastian Caruso was sitting in the chair beside the bed. He wasn’t doing anything. Not on his phone, not reading, just sitting. His forearms rested on his knees, and he was looking at the floor, and his face was doing something she had never once seen it do in four months of living in his house and eating meals that his chef left on the counter, and writing notes he read every morning. He looked like he was afraid.

She must have made a sound, because he looked up immediately, sealed over, almost, but not completely. Not in time. “The twins,” she said. Her voice came out rougher than expected. “They’re fine. They weren’t touched.” He paused. “Because of you.” “Where are they?” “Here. Down the hall.” A beat. “They’ve been asking for you, in their own way.” She thought about Kit’s rabbit. She thought about Lara’s habit of patting her own chest when she was happy, like she was checking that the feeling was real. “They’re okay.” “They’re okay.” She exhaled. Something in her chest loosened that she hadn’t realized was braced.