Chapter 25
Nora
When we return to pick up my car, he kisses me again.
It’s different from the smash-room kiss.
That was all fury and adrenaline. This is slower.
Deliberate. His hands frame my face the way they have before, except this time his eyes are open when he pulls back, and there’s no panic.
Just a man who said he loves me, looking at me like the world makes sense for the first time in weeks.
“I should go,” I say, which is the responsible thing.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t let go of my face.
“You need to get home. Serena and her friends will be bringing Michaela back soon.”
“I know.”
“And I need to feed Archie. He gets existential when dinner is late.”
“Understandable.”
Neither of us moves.
His thumbs trace the line of my cheekbones. We’re standing between his car and mine in a courthouse parking lot on a Thursday afternoon, the air smelling like late fall and exhaust, and somehow this is still one of the most intimate moments of my life.
“I’m serious,” I whisper, though my mouth brushes his when I say it, which undermines my authority considerably.
“So am I.”
“That’s the problem.”
His mouth curves. “I thought the problem was Archie’s dinner schedule.”
“That too.”
He kisses me again, brief this time. Then he exhales and rests his forehead against mine, which is wildly dangerous to my ability to function like an adult.
“Come home with me,” he says.
“David—”
“Not for me.” He drops his hands but stays close. “For Michaela. When we tell her about the ruling, she’s going to need—” He pauses. “It would mean a lot to her. Having you there. She loves you.”
My heart does a stupid, painful thing in my chest.
“I love her, too,” I say. “She’s the most extraordinary little girl I’ve ever met. And I—” The sentence catches somewhere between my throat and the truth. “I don’t understand how someone could walk away from her. I suppose that’s why I’ve had so much trouble walking away from any of this.”
David’s expression shifts—a deepening around the eyes, a softening around his mouth. He knows why this is hard for me. I just told him, and I feel silly getting so attached to a little girl who isn’t mine. But, god, I can’t help it.
Just like I can’t help feeling attached to him.
“Come,” he says again. “Just for a little while.”
I think about Archie, who will be philosophically distressed about his dinner. I think about professional boundaries, school board reviews, and all the reasons a principal should not be driving to a student’s father’s apartment on the evening of a custody ruling.
I think about a young girl who is about to find out that a woman she’s afraid of just won the right to see her.
“OK,” I say. “Let me follow you.”
David’s apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a building that believes in copper accents, white marble, and the kind of warm wood paneling that makes hallways feel less like corridors and more like the inside of a very expensive humidor.
It is, in short, a terrible place to bring vulnerable feelings if one hopes to remain emotionally unperforated.
David steps out of the elevator beside me with his keys in one hand and his jacket folded over the other arm, tie still crooked and his hair disordered in a way that makes my fingers itch with deeply irresponsible intentions.
He looks tired down to his marrow. Like the hearing reached inside him and rearranged his bones.
I want to touch him. But I don’t.
Mostly because if I start, I may not stop, and we’re approximately thirty seconds away from having to tell a little girl that her life is about to become less secure.
The apartment door opens into quiet.
The entry table holds a crystal bowl for keys, and beside it, a pink plastic barrette with a glitter star glued to the side.
On the wall, a framed charcoal-and-gold abstract that’s clearly the real thing, and below it a child’s drawing of a dog with fourteen legs labeled ARCHIE IF HE WAS A CENTIPEDE.
I stop and stare at that for one full second.
David follows my line of sight and an amused sound leaves him. “She was experimenting.”
“I can see that.”
The apartment opens into a large living area with windows that turn half of Chicago into backdrop.
It should feel cold—all glass, height, and expensive furniture.
Instead it feels used. Lived in. A home built by a man who knows exactly where the Band-Aids are, which cabinet contains the good crackers, and how many night-lights his daughter requires on a difficult evening.
There’s a rainbow-striped blanket on the enormous dark blue couch that matches nothing and therefore can only belong to a child.
On the fridge, magnets shaped like fruit hold up a spelling test and a photo booth strip of David and Michaela making progressively worse faces at the camera.
The last frame is just her squashing his cheeks while he endures it with martyrdom.
Something warm and piercing lodges under my ribs. This is what a life looks like when someone stayed to build it. Not perfect—cluttered and lopsided and full of fourteen-legged dogs—but built. By a man who didn’t leave.
“This is lovely,” I say softly.
David sets his keys in the crystal bowl. “That’s generous. It’s usually louder.”
“I like louder.”
His mouth shifts, tired and fond at once. “You say that now.”
David glances down at his phone, thumb brushing the screen, and whatever he sees shifts something in his face.
“They’re close,” he says. “About ten minutes.”
My stomach tightens on instinct.
“Are we . . . Are we sure I should be here?”
David lifts his eyes from the phone to me, and all the softness in the parking lot is still there under the fatigue.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m sure.”
I fold my arms, then unfold them immediately because it makes me look stern.
A faint line appears between his brows. “Do you want to leave?”
No. The answer rises so quickly and cleanly it startles me.
But want and wisdom have been estranged for some time now.
“I want to do what’s best for Michaela.”
“So do I.” He slips the phone into his pocket. “That’s why I asked you to come.”
The simplicity of that lands heavily. There is nothing seductive in his tone now. Nothing reckless. Just a father making an assessment in the wreckage of a day and deciding what might help his child most.
“She trusts you,” he says. “And before you say it, yes, I know she trusts me too. I’m not outsourcing this.” His mouth tightens. “I just . . . I think hearing it from both of us, that she’s safe and that we’re handling it, will make this less frightening.”
Both of us.
My pulse trips over that phrasing and then pretends it didn’t.
“I don’t want to overstep.”
“You aren’t,” he says, moving closer and taking my hands in his. “I know this is complicated. And I know we need to be careful, but this isn’t me asking you to play a role. I’m asking you to be yourself. With her. That’s all.”
He lifts my hands and presses a kiss against my open palm. I swoon.
“I can do that,” I murmur, trying not to let my knees go too soft.
His shoulders loosen a fraction as he releases my hands. “Good.”
The buzzer at the front entry goes off.
Every muscle in David’s body locks at once. Then he crosses to the panel by the door and presses the button. “Come up.”
His voice is calm. Flat enough to be useful. I file that away with the thousand other ways he protects Michaela from his own fear.
He turns back to me. “She’ll know something’s wrong the second she sees my face.”
“She’d know something was wrong if you switched brands of dish soap.”
“That’s fair.”
I hesitate, then step closer and straighten his tie without asking.
It’s a small thing. Absurdly intimate. The silk is warm from his skin, and his breath catches.
His eyes find mine.
For one dangerous second, the whole apartment narrows to the knot of silk under my fingers and the look on his face as I smooth the tie flat against his shirt. There’s far too much history in this gesture for two people who are supposedly being careful.
“Better,” I say softly.
“I was hoping you’d say devastatingly handsome under pressure.”
“I was aiming for minimally disheveled for a custody-traumatized attorney.”
“That’s the dream.”
The elevator dings down the hall.
Everything in me goes alert at once.
Then voices travel through the door. Michaela’s first—bright, fast—followed by Serena’s lower drawl and what sounds like Layla laughing at something.
David opens the door.
Michaela barrels in.
She’s carrying two shopping bags, wearing a new purple coat with silver buttons, and talking before she’s fully over the threshold. “Serena said this one was practical, but I think practical is often a conspiracy against joy, and Layla said—”
She stops.
Her eyes find David first. Then me.
The air changes.
Children know. They always know. Michaela’s whole body stills as she scans the room, her eyes landing on me.
“Hi, Miss Nora,” she says slowly.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
She sets the bags down without taking her eyes off her father. “Did the hearing happen already?”
David steps aside so Serena and Layla can come in. Serena takes one look at his face, then at mine, and whatever she reads there wipes the easy amusement from hers. Layla’s expression gentles at once.
“It did,” David says.
Michaela doesn’t move. “I have to visit with her, don’t I?”
I watch David’s face change—something between composure and pain arranged into straight lines.
He crouches in front of Michaela until they’re eye level.
“Yeah, monster. The judge decided that your—that Kelsie gets to see you. One afternoon a week. Her husband, Thomas, will be there.”
“I don’t know Thomas.”
“I know. We’ll make sure you’re prepared.”
“Will you be there?”
“No. Not in the room. But Nora will do handover at school, and I’ll be picking you up. On time. Every time.”
Michaela blinks. Her chin lifts half an inch in that fierce little way of hers that usually means she’s about to object to reality on procedural grounds.
“I don’t like this,” she says.