Chapter 45
David
“Maybe Marta forgot her keys?” I say as I move to the intercom.
Caleb would text first. Dominic would text, call, and then show up anyway, but it’s nine in the morning, and even Dominic has limits. Bennett doesn’t do unannounced visits. Logan doesn’t do visits. Plus, they’re all probably still recovering from last night . . .
I lift the receiver. “Yes?”
“Mr. Kingsley,” the concierge says. “I have a Kelsie Canning here to see you.”
I stare at the intercom, vision narrowing so fast it’s like someone just sucked the oxygen out of the apartment. Michaela looks at me, then at the wall monitor, the energy in her body going from wild to locked down in half a heartbeat.
“What is she doing here?” she whispers, her expression tight.
“I don’t know.” I press the button again. “Can you pass the phone to her, please?” My voice is level, but the stress is vibrating under my skin.
There’s a pause on the other end, then a voice that’s more familiar than I’m ever ready for. “It’s urgent, David. Please.”
I look at Michaela, who is now stone still in the kitchen, fingers splayed on the counter. I don’t want her to hear whatever this is.
“Dad,” she says quietly.
“Go to your room, monster.”
“But—”
“Please. I’ll handle this.”
She looks at me. The bounce is gone. The vibration is gone. In its place is the squared-shoulder stillness of a child who has been navigating this terrain for months and knows what it costs.
She walks to her room. Closes the door. Quietly.
I press the intercom again. “Come up.”
I don’t know why she’s here. It’s not a visitation day. There’s no hearing scheduled. There’s no legal reason for Kelsie Canning to be standing in the lobby of my building on a Sunday morning, and the absence of a reason is itself a reason to be concerned.
The knock comes two minutes later.
I open the door.
Kelsie is in the hallway wearing a fitted cashmere sweater.
Jeans I’d assume are designer with brown boots to her knees.
Her hair is down, soft, the way she used to wear it when we were dating—the way she wore it on the night we met, at a bar in Lincoln Park, when she looked at me across a room and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and it took me six years to understand that beauty and warmth aren’t the same thing.
“David,” she says. Her voice is different. Softer. More personal. I’m instantly on alert.
“Kelsie. It’s nine o’clock on a Sunday, and this isn’t your weekend.”
“I know. I’m sorry for not calling first.” She doesn’t look sorry. She looks calculated. But the calculation is wearing a different costume today—vulnerability instead of composure, warmth instead of poise.
“Thomas knows you’re here?”
A flicker. “Thomas doesn’t need to know everything I do.”
That sentence tells me more than anything she’s said in months of custody proceedings.
“What do you want, Kelsie?”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
She blinks. She expected to be let in. Of course she did. Kelsie has spent her entire life getting what she wants.
“David. Please. Five minutes.”
“You can say whatever you need to say from the hallway.”
She looks at me. Recalculates. Adjusts.
“This is too . . . personal for the hallway, David. Please.”
I stare at her. Her eyes are shiny, big, the way they used to get when she was about to ask for something extravagant—or confess to something she thought was cute.
She used to be my first language.
The little twitches of her mouth, what every blink meant, all the micro-calibrations of intent and desire.
Now, every movement looks like acting. But there’s something about the way she’s fidgeting—one hand plucking at the hem of her sweater, the way she keeps glancing over my shoulder into the apartment—that has me on edge.
She steps closer, just enough that I have to recalibrate the fight-or-flight cocktail of adrenaline and exhaustion surging in my veins. I see the moment she decides to drop the script.
“Can we talk inside?” she says again. Something pleading now, pitched so even I almost buy it.
I hold my ground. “Kelsie. What do you want?”
She looks left, right—checks for neighbors, for witnesses. Then she leans in, voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t want them to hear. Please.”
A muscle jumps in my jaw. I step aside half an inch, enough to let her into the entryway but not the rest of the apartment.
She enters. The air changes. She glances across to the living room, sees the stack of law journals, the framed print Michaela gave me last Father’s Day, the shoe rack by the door.
She always used to make fun of that—the strict allocation, my compulsion for tidiness.
“Oh wow. I didn’t expect to feel so . . . nostalgic being back here.”
“Just make your point so you can leave.”
She turns to face me. Her eyes are brimming, too bright.
“I made a mistake,” she says.
“I agree. You never should have forced your way back into Michaela’s life.”
“No, David.” She flashes me an intimate smile that immediately turns my stomach. “I’m talking about us.”
I take a step back. “There is no us.”
“There was once.” She steps closer. “We were good together, David. Before everything went wrong. Before I—”
“Before you left your daughter alone for fourteen hours.”
“Before I made mistakes.” Her voice catches. Perfectly timed. The tremor in exactly the right place. “I was young. I was overwhelmed. And I’ve spent every day since regretting what I threw away.”
She reaches out and touches my arm. Her hand is warm. Her eyes are wide, soft, doing exactly what they’re designed to do—the full deployment of a face I once loved, aimed at a version of me that hasn’t existed for years.
“This case. Seeing you again.” She tilts her head.
“I miss you, David. I never should’ve left you,” she says.
“I see that now. We had something, didn’t we?
Chemistry. History. A child. And I know you’ve moved on—I saw the way you were with that principal in the courtroom—but I need you to hear me when I say—”
“Stop.” I remove her hand from my arm.
“David—”
“Stop.”
She does, finally, but only because I put enough steel in the word that even Kelsie listens for a change.
Whatever expression she was arranging falters.
“I’m engaged,” I say. “To the woman you just referred to as ‘that principal’ because reducing other women is apparently still your cardio. So let me save you some time: there’s no version of reality in which you show up at my home unannounced, try to romanticize abandonment, and get to rewrite history because your current narrative is collapsing. ”
Her face stills.
That lands.
Good.
For one second the softness drains out of her entirely and I see the real thing underneath—cold, quick, furious.
Then she puts the mask back on.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she asks, voice trembling with insult calibrated for maximum effect. “Trying to rewrite history?”
“I know that’s what you’re doing.”
“You don’t know anything about what I’m feeling.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “Kelsie, I used to know what every look on your face meant. You’re either here because you’re jealous and can’t stand the fact I’ve moved on, or because Thomas is onto your bullshit and you’re losing.”
Her chin lifts. “You’re being cruel.”
“No. I’m being accurate. Cruel would be letting you continue this conversation under the illusion I might be moved by it.”
She stares at me, and I can almost hear her reorganizing the strategy in real time. Seduction didn’t work. Nostalgia didn’t work. So now she’ll reach for injury.
“I came here because I’m scared,” she says.
I fold my arms. “Of what?”
She pouts. “Of losing everything.”
There it is. Not Michaela. Not motherhood. Everything.
My stomach turns.
“You should probably talk to your husband,” I say.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It rarely is when you’ve been lying to multiple people at once.”
Her eyes flash. “You always did love feeling morally superior.”
“No. I love my daughter. You keep confusing the two.”
For a second, neither of us speaks. Blood pounds in my ears.
“Go home, Kelsie.”
The vulnerability drops. It happens in stages—the softness leaving her eyes, then her mouth, then her posture. Like a screen being retracted. Like a woman stepping out of a costume she put on this morning specifically for this scene.
“You’re really going to choose her,” Kelsie spits. “A fat dumpy woman who couldn’t find a man to give her a family of her own, so she stole mine?”
I don’t remember crossing the space between us.
One second she’s standing in my entryway with that sneer on her face, and the next I’m in front of her, every muscle in my body gone frighteningly still.
“Get out.”
My voice is so quiet it doesn’t even sound like mine.
Kelsie blinks, maybe because she expected shouting. Maybe because she expected me to defend Nora in the language of argument and civility, not with the kind of cold that makes the room feel smaller.
“David—”
“Get. Out.”
I point at the door.
She laughs once under her breath, ugly and disbelieving. “Wow. She really has you trained.”
I take one more step toward the door and hold it open. “You came into my home. You stood under the same roof as my daughter and spoke about the woman I love like that. You’re leaving now.”
Her face hardens. “Oh, please. Don’t act scandalized. I’m saying what everyone can see.”
“No,” I say. “You’re saying what you are.”
That hits. I see it. A flicker. Then anger rushes in to cover it.
“You think you’ve won because you found some sad little school administrator willing to play house with you and my daughter?”
I smile then, and there’s absolutely nothing kind in it. “My fiancée is a brilliant, compassionate, extraordinary woman who’s done more actual mothering in a year than you’ve managed in your entire life.”
Her nostrils flare.
“Keep talking,” she says, her smile turning pure malice. “Please. Because if you think I won’t come after you with everything I have, you’re stupider than I thought.”
My grip tightens on the door.
“Kelsie—”