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

## CHAPTER 6

When she finished, he said, “Her treatment. Let me help.” “I’m not — I’m not offering charity,” he said carefully. “I’m saying that you threw yourself in front of a bullet for my children, and you’ve been quietly managing a crisis alone for months, and you are—” He stopped, tried again. “You are not alone in this house. You don’t have to act like you are.” She looked at him. “Why does it matter to you?” He looked back at her, and for once he didn’t measure the words before he said them. “Because I’ve been watching you for four months, and I can’t — I don’t want to watch from a distance anymore.” He paused. “That’s not something I’ve said to anyone in a long time.” Down the hall, she heard Lara stir and resettle. “Bastian,” she said. “Yes.” “The notes, the questions at the bottom.” She watched his face. “Were those about the children?” A long pause. “Some of them,” he said. “Not all of them.” She nodded slowly. Something inside her that had been waiting for stability, for ground solid enough to stand on, for someone to stand beside her instead of asking her to stand alone, settled. “Okay,” she said. He didn’t ask what she meant. He understood the way she’d understood “stay.” The way some things don’t need filling in.

The conversation about her mother’s treatment continued past that evening. Bastian, once he’d committed to helping, approached the problem with the same thoroughness he brought to his business dealings, researching specialists and treatment programs with a focus that Selene found both touching and slightly overwhelming. Within a week he had produced a folder with three oncology programs in the greater Chicago area, each with detailed notes on their approach to her mother’s specific condition, clearly compiled after hours of research he’d conducted late at night after the twins were asleep and his own work was finished. “You didn’t have to do all this,” she told him, flipping through the pages he’d assembled. “I wanted to understand what I was offering to help with,” he said. “It seemed important to actually know something rather than just throwing money at the problem.” That distinction, she would come to realize, was central to who Bastian Caruso actually was beneath the careful, guarded exterior — a man who had learned, through loss, that money solved almost nothing that actually mattered, and had begun, slowly, relearning what did.

Her mother flew out to Chicago in May. Selene hadn’t planned it. The visit had been tentative, dependent on how her mother felt, on the new medication, on a half-dozen variables that Selene had learned not to count on. But on a Tuesday morning, her mother called and said she felt well enough to travel, and something in her voice was different, lighter. And Selene said, “Come.” The twins met Elena Marsh in the entryway, which was becoming their thing, and Lara studied her for four seconds with enormous seriousness before deciding, apparently, that Elena had passed some invisible test, because she handed her a foam block. Kit patted her knee. Elena laughed, the real laugh, not the polite one, and that was that.

Bastian shook her mother’s hand and said he was glad she could come, and Elena looked at him with the particular clarity of a woman who had raised a daughter who had learned to hide everything she was feeling, and said, “She talks about the children constantly. I can tell she loves it here.” “We’re glad she’s here,” Bastian said, and he said it simply, without the careful management she’d spent four months learning to read around. That night, after dinner, after the twins were down and Elena was reading in the guest room, Selene stood at the kitchen window and looked at the lights of the city below. All those lit squares, all those people inside them, and she thought about October, the unemployment office, the water stain, the phone buzzing in her hand with a number she almost hadn’t called. She thought, *What if I hadn’t?*

She heard him come in. He stood beside her at the window. Neither of them said anything for a while. “Kit said a sentence today,” she said finally. “I heard.” He paused. “Want more blocks.” “Three words. Four technically. Want more the blocks. He dropped the ‘the’ before he got to you.” She felt rather than saw him smile. She still wasn’t used to that — the way he smiled now, rarely but completely, like something that had been bricked up had found a window. “He’s going to talk constantly in six months,” she said. “You know that, right? They both are. You need to prepare yourself.” “I’m prepared.” “You’re not.” “I’m working on it,” he said. “I’m working on a few things.”