SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY
## CHAPTER 5
She came home. She thought of it as home now, and she didn’t examine that too closely. On a Friday, the twins were in the entryway when she came through the door, which meant someone had told them she was coming, and the sight of them — Lara’s arms already raised before Selene had even crossed the threshold, Kit barreling into her knees with his whole body — made her eyes sting in a way she would deny to anyone who asked. She knelt on the floor and held them both, shoulder aching, and Lara pressed her small face into Selene’s neck, and Kit clutched her sleeve, and none of them said anything. Then Lara pulled back and patted Selene’s chest the way she did when she was checking. “I’m here,” Selene said. “I’m right here.” The physical therapy had been difficult in ways she hadn’t anticipated, the shoulder healing slower than she wanted, every reach and stretch a small negotiation with pain, but none of that mattered in this particular moment, kneeling on the marble floor with both children finally, physically, reassured that she was solid and present and not going anywhere.
Behind them, Bastian was standing at the edge of the hallway. She could feel him more than she could see him. He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look up yet because if she looked up, she thought her face might tell him something she wasn’t ready to hand him. But then Kit looked up at his father, and then at Selene, and then at his father again, with the deep seriousness of a toddler who has decided something important, and said, clearly, unmistakably, “Stay.” Selene finally looked up. Bastian was looking at his son. His expression was open in a way she had never once seen in a boardroom photo, in a building corridor, in a kitchen at midnight. Open and unguarded and something that looked very much like grateful. Then he looked at her and he said, “Yeah, buddy. She’s staying.” It wasn’t a declaration. He wasn’t the kind of man who made declarations.
What he did in the weeks that followed was show up. He left work at 6 instead of 9. He read the morning notes and then left a question scrawled at the bottom in his heavy, precise handwriting. *Lara rejected the pears again. Is this a texture thing or the specific fruit? And Kit seems to favor the left hand. Is that meaningful at this age?* The questions got longer. She started leaving more room on the notes. One evening in March, she came into the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with both twins, stacking foam blocks that they immediately knocked over. He looked up when she came in. He didn’t explain himself. She sat down on the floor across from him. They built towers. The twins knocked them down. Lara laughed so hard she hiccuped. Kit ate one of the blocks and was gently discouraged from doing it again. They didn’t talk about what any of it meant.
But on a Saturday in April, while both twins were napping and the apartment was quiet, and Selene was at the island looking at her mother’s latest test results on her phone — not good, but not worse, which was the best they were getting this year — she heard him come in and stop behind her. “Your mother,” he said. “You’ve never talked about her.” “You’ve never asked.” He was quiet. Then, “I’m asking.” She set the phone down. She told him about the diagnosis, about the medication the insurance wouldn’t cover, about the money she’d been sending back every month, and why the salary mattered so much when she’d walked into that interview. She told him about the water stain on the ceiling in the unemployment office shaped like a state she still couldn’t identify. He listened the way he did most things, fully, without interrupting.