Prologue #3
“Will they?” He’s shaking now, his voice rising as he paces the small dining room.
“Because all Kelsie has to do is claim mental health reasons and show off her fancy new husband, and talk about how she’s changed, and suddenly she’s the sympathetic one.
Suddenly I’m the villain who ‘kept her from her child.’”
“You’re not a villain. Anyone who knows you—”
“I didn’t keep her from anything, Nora. I begged.
She left. She chose to leave. Didn’t even want to care for Michaela as a baby .
. .” He stops moving and leans against the wall, eyes wet, and I realize with a start that he’s close to tears.
“God, maybe she did have postpartum. But that doesn’t excuse what she did.
And now some judge who’s never met my daughter gets to decide whether Kelsie deserves access to the life she threw away.
To the child she neglected and put in harm’s way . . .”
“David.” I move toward him without thinking. “You’re not going to lose her.”
“You don’t know that.” His voice breaks completely. “You don’t know what it’s like to have everything you love threatened by someone who already proved she doesn’t care. To wake up every morning terrified that today’s the day it all falls apart.”
“You’re right. I don’t know.” I’m standing in front of him now, close enough to see the exhaustion etched into every line of his face. “But I know Michaela. I know how she talks about you—‘my dad says’ this and ‘my dad thinks’ that. You’re her whole world. Anyone can see that.”
“It might not be enough.” His breath catches, and then the composure he’s been clinging to all day finally shatters—not into sobs, but into something rawer.
Frustrated tears, the kind that come from anger and helplessness and loving someone so fiercely it physically hurts.
“What if . . . What if she wins? What if she takes her and hurts her and . . . and I’m not there?
” He drops his head against the wall. “Fuck.”
I touch his shoulder—intending only to anchor him, to remind him he’s here and not lost out in some recollection of the past—but my fingers linger, and in the silence he looks down at me, his expression splintered.
I don’t know if he means to, or if I do, but the space between us narrows like a closing suture, and suddenly he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me.
It’s not gentle. It’s desperate, almost frantic—a man grasping for something solid while everything else spins out of control. His lips are warm and firm, and for one suspended moment I forget every professional boundary I’ve ever set, every rule I’ve built my career on.
I kiss him back.
His hands tremble against my jaw, and I realize with a clear, clinical detachment that David isn’t clinging to me—he’s falling, and I’m simply what he grabs on the way down.
His mouth is hungry, searching, the scrape of stubble an abrasion against my cheek.
The taste of him—salt, bitterness, whatever he’s been holding in all day—jolts through me, sharper than the first shock of cold after a swim.
For the space of three shallow breaths, I am as desperate as he is. Then the principal part of me—the version that built her entire existence on steady ground—forces a break.
I pull back, hands flat on his chest. “David—”
He stiffens, jaw set, eyes wild. “Shit. I’m sorry.
” He lets me go so quickly I nearly stumble, and then it’s his turn to retreat, scrubbing both hands over his face and pacing a line in front of the refrigerator.
“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—that was completely inappropriate.
You’re Michaela’s principal, and I just—God, I’m sorry. ”
“David, it’s—”
“It’s not OK.” He’s on his feet, backing toward the hallway. “You could lose your job. I could compromise the custody case. This was—I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking.”
“David—”
“I need to get Michaela. I need to go.”
He’s in the guest room before I can stop him, scooping his sleeping daughter into his arms with practiced gentleness. Michaela stirs, mumbles, “Daddy?” and burrows into his shoulder without fully waking.
“Thank you,” he says as he passes me in the hallway, my dog trailing behind him. “For watching her. For everything. I’m sorry I overstepped. It won’t happen again.”
I grab my dog’s collar. “You don’t have to—”
“Goodbye, Principal Harrison.”
Principal Harrison. Not Nora. The wall going up in real time.
He carries his daughter out into the evening, and I stand in my doorway watching until his car disappears around the corner.
Then I close the door and lean against it, heart pounding.
He kissed me.
David Kingsley—single father, school parent, subject of approximately eight months of daydreams I’ve refused to acknowledge—just grabbed my face and kissed me like I was the only solid thing in a world falling apart.
And I kissed him back.
I touch my lips. They’re still tingling.
I should be upset. I should be professionally outraged. He’s a parent at my school. His daughter is my student. If anyone found out, there would be questions. Meetings with the board. The kind of whispered conversations that end careers.
The administration doesn’t have an explicit policy against staff dating parents—parents aren’t employees, so standard fraternization rules don’t apply.
But there’s an unwritten understanding at schools like mine: you simply don’t.
The power dynamics are too complicated. The potential for favoritism, for accusations, for disaster.
I’ve never even considered crossing that line before. But with David...
God, what am I even considering?
I don’t even know. But I keep thinking about the crack in his voice when he said I can’t lose her. The way he looked at Michaela sleeping in my guest room. The desperation in his kiss—not romantic, not seductive, just a man reaching for something real in the middle of a nightmare.
I pour myself a glass of wine and sink onto the couch with my dog to try to process.
“He’s going to avoid me now,” I tell Archimedes—Archie for short. “He’ll keep his distance. Probably request that Michaela be transferred to another class, so he doesn’t have to see me as often.”
Archie puts his head in my lap and sighs, which I take as agreement.
“You’re right. It’s the smart play. The safe play. For both of us.”
So why do I keep touching my lips?
My phone buzzes. A text from my sister.
Lil Sis:
Want to see a movie this weekend?
Me:
Can I think about it?
Lil Sis:
Sure. Everything good?
I stare at the screen for a long moment.
Me:
Complicated, I type back. I’ll call you Friday and explain.
She sends me a heart emoji, and I set down the phone, looking out the window at the evening settling over the neighborhood. Somewhere across the city, David is putting Michaela to bed. Answering impossible questions. Being everything his daughter needs, even while he’s falling apart.
The smart thing would be to pretend this never happened.
But I’ve spent my whole life doing the smart thing. And I’m starting to wonder what it might feel like to do something else.