SHE TOOK A BULLET FOR HIS TWINS—CEO REALIZES HIS NANNY WAS ALWAYS HIS FAMILY
## CHAPTER 9
On a warm evening in August, nearly a year after Selene had first ridden that elevator to the forty-fourth floor, Bastian found her on the terrace after the twins were asleep, watching the sunset paint the skyline in shades of orange and rose that neither of them had time to properly appreciate on most ordinary evenings. He sat beside her without announcement, the two of them settling into the particular comfortable silence that had become their default over months of shared exhaustion and shared joy, the kind of silence that no longer needed filling because both of them had learned exactly what the other’s quiet meant. “I never thanked you properly,” he said eventually. “For any of it. Not just the parking garage. For staying when eleven other people didn’t. For teaching me how to read a toddler’s grief instead of just managing it. For—” He stopped, searching for the right words in a way that had become rarer for him as the months passed, his old careful precision slowly giving way to something more natural, less guarded. “For giving me my children back,” he finished. “I don’t think I fully understood, before you, how much of them I was missing simply because I didn’t know how to be present for it.”
Selene considered this, watching the light shift over the water in the distance, the particular gold that only lasted a few minutes before fading into something softer. “You were grieving too,” she said. “Nobody expects a man to parent perfectly while he’s drowning.” “You didn’t drown.” “I had somewhere to put it,” she said. “The twins needed me to be steady, so I found a way to be steady. That’s not the same as not drowning. It’s just drowning quietly, in a way that still lets you show up for other people.” He looked at her for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that she had learned, over the months, to recognize as the particular effort of a man deciding to say something significant rather than simply thinking it.
“I don’t want you to have to drown quietly anymore,” he said. “Not for my children, not for your mother, not for anyone. I want—” He paused again, then continued more steadily. “I want to be the person you don’t have to manage everything alone in front of. I think I’ve wanted that for a while now, and I was too careful to say it.” The words settled between them with a weight that felt, after everything, entirely natural rather than sudden — the culmination of a year built from morning notes and midnight kitchen conversations, foam block towers and hospital room silences, a toddler’s single fierce word of “stay” that had said everything neither adult had been ready to say themselves.
Selene reached over and took his hand, an ordinary gesture that felt, in that particular light, like the quiet conclusion of something that had been building since the moment she’d chosen not to run in that parking garage, choosing instead to hold on tighter to what mattered. “I’ve known for a while too,” she admitted. “I just didn’t think it was my place to say it first. You’re my employer. Or you were. I never quite figured out when that stopped being the accurate word for what this is.” “It stopped a long time ago,” Bastian said. “I think it stopped the day you kept your arms around that stroller instead of running. I just didn’t have the language for it yet, the same way Kit doesn’t always have the language for what he’s feeling. I had to sit with it a while before I understood what it actually was.” “And now?” she asked. “Now I know exactly what it is,” he said, and for the first time since she’d met him, there was nothing careful or measured in his voice at all — just plain, unguarded certainty. “It’s you. It’s been you for a while now.”
They sat together as the last of the color drained from the sky, the city’s lights beginning their nightly climb into the darkening air, and neither of them felt any particular urgency to move, content in the way that only comes after a long stretch of careful, patient waiting has finally, quietly, resolved itself into something solid.