32. Chapter Thirty-Two Ruby
Chapter Thirty-Two: Ruby
T he second I heard the front door unlocking, panic jolted through me. Shit. I turned to Kieran, still half-dressed, still stretched out in my bed like he fucking belonged there.
He lifted an eyebrow, lazy and amused, completely unbothered.
Shit? What time was it? I looked at the clock.
Eight. I must have overslept after Kieran woke me up.
Panic twisted through my gut, cold and frantic. How long had I been asleep? Long enough for them to be back already. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
No one could know I’d been with Kieran Callahan. Certainly not Julian.
Definitely not Rosie.
Fuck.
Kieran was still watching me, like I was some show put on for his entertainment. One corner of his mouth lifted. “Problem?” he asked, voice low and easy.
I glared at him, wishing I could be as unconcerned, as utterly at ease. “You heard that, right?”
“Heard what?”
“That.” I pointed toward the door, heart thudding against my ribs. “Julian and Rosie.”
“Ah.” He shifted slightly, stretching his arms over his head, muscles flexing in a way that would’ve been distracting if I weren’t about to have a fucking heart attack. “Okay.”
That was it. Okay. Like he had nowhere else to be. Like he belonged here. Like he wasn’t a Callahan and I wasn’t newly elected District Attorney who had just violated a plethora of laws last night, as if none of this was about to explode in our faces.
I stared at him, trying to shove down the rising tide of anxiety. He really wasn’t going to move. “Shit, Kieran, do something!”
“You seem upset,” he said, a smirk playing across his lips.
I clenched my teeth, in no mood for this. Not now.
He let out a lazy breath, letting his eyes fall closed again. “Relax. We’ve got time.”
“Rosie is going to realize I’m not downstairs and she’s going to come up here. I need you to move.”
“Okay…”
“I don’t just need you to move. If you go downstairs, they’ll see you. Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Okay, you need to hide. Get in the closet.”
He didn’t budge. “You want me to get in the closet?”
“This is not happening,” I hissed, half to him and half to myself. “Yes! Get in the closet.”
“I thought you two were broken up.”
“We are! This isn’t about him, it’s about my daughter. This is happening, Kieran. Get in the fucking closet.”
He stared at me like I’d grown a second head, utterly incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”
I was dead serious. “Kieran!”
His smirk widened, eyes flicking to the door and then back to me. “You’re panicking over nothing.”
Nothing. Like he wasn’t in my bed. Like he hadn’t made me forget everything last night, even how to breathe. Like Julian finding him here wasn’t about to be a total fucking disaster.
He was unbelievable.
“Please,” I said, the desperation clear in my voice.
“You’re not actually afraid of him.”
No. Not of him. Of everything else. “Just—just get up and—” I made a wild, frantic gesture at the closet.
Kieran let out a long, exaggerated sigh. Like it was all some huge inconvenience.
He stretched again, completely at ease. “They won’t find me,” he said, his tone so sure.
“The hell they won’t!”
“They won’t if we leave. We could just…climb down this window. If we’re reverting back to the way we solved problems when we were kids, that could work.”
“Kieran,” I hissed under my breath. “I do not have time to argue with you about this. You have two options here. You get in the closet right fucking now or I start screaming and act like you broke into my bedroom. Which option do you want to choose?”
“You’re crazy,” Kieran said.
“Just do this one thing for me,” I said, knowing I sounded desperate. “Please.”
I heard the sound of laughter downstairs.
Kieran groaned, more like I’d asked him to run a marathon than to hide from my ex-husband and daughter before they found my very-much-criminal, very-nearly-naked lover in my bed. “Ruby,” he said, half amused, half annoyed.
“Fine.”
And finally—finally—he got up.
He was so goddamn smug about it, still moving slow, still smirking at me like this was some ridiculous game I was making him play.
“Thank you,” I said, exasperated, shoving him toward the closet door.
“Can’t believe this,” he muttered, bending to grab his shirt off the floor.
He looked at me again, eyes glinting with amusement, with that Kieran confidence that everything would be fine. “I kill a man for you,” he said, “and now I have to hide? Great fucking deal.”
I shoved him one last time, and he ducked inside just as the footsteps got closer. I opened the window a crack, worried the room smelled like sex, and then made sure the door to the closet was fully closed.
“Shut the fuck up, Kieran,” I said under my breath.
I grabbed the remote, quickly turned the TV on to a random news channel and took a deep breath as I heard their footsteps right outside the door.
The closet door shut a second before Julian stepped into the bedroom with Rosie. She spotted me immediately.
“Mami!”
I barely had time to brace myself before she launched her body into my arms. I caught her, burying my face in her curls, inhaling the sweet scent of shampoo and safety.
She was warm and soft and her tiny arms wrapped tight around my neck like she never wanted to let go.
Something inside me cracked, deep and painful. I almost didn’t live to see this moment.
I almost didn’t get to hold my daughter again. Fuck.
I squeezed my eyes shut, held her tighter. “Hey, tesoro.”
My voice, by some miracle, didn’t shake.
Rosie. Sweet and small and mine. She clung to me, fingers twisting in my hair like I might disappear if she let go. Like she could hold me here forever, and it would keep me safe.
Maybe it would.
I wanted to stay like that, buried in her warmth, in her perfect innocence, in her complete, unwavering love. Like the world outside this moment didn’t exist.
“I missed you,” I whispered.
Rosie giggled, her voice bright against my skin. “I was only gone one night!”
One night. The longest of my life.
She pulled back, looking at me with wide eyes, trying to make sense of the heaviness I felt settling into my chest. I kissed her cheek, breathed her in, didn’t let her go. I didn’t know how to let her go.
I glanced up and saw Julian leaning against the doorframe, watching me closely.
The look on his face was a punch to the gut. Careful. Assessing. Like he knew how close I’d come to losing everything. To losing her. Like he could see right through the mask I was trying so hard to keep in place.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, forcing a smile. “Fine.”
I didn’t fool him. Not for a second.
Rosie wiggled in my arms, and I set her on the bed. She immediately flopped onto her stomach, kicking her feet in the air as she launched into a winding story about some stuffed animal drama at Julian’s place.
I tried to listen. I really did.
But Julian was still watching me.
His gaze flicked to the bed, to the mess of sheets and pillows that I hadn’t even thought to fix in my panic.
The window. The faint smell of bleach that clung to everything. His brow furrowed.
He had to have noticed something was off. His gaze roamed around the room, pausing on my pillow, on the messed up sheets.
“What happened here?”
I swallowed. “We can talk about it later.”
“Rosie, peanut, why don’t you go put your things in your room?” Julian asked. “Then, if Mami isn’t too busy, we can go for breakfast.”
“Uh, I’m not—I mean, Alek is coming over soon.”
“Is Nat coming?” Rosie asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“I think she’s still in New York City, baby,” I replied.
“She could bring her boyfriend!” Rosie declared.
Julian smirked. “Yeah, we’ll ask next time Alek’s sister is in town. You know, Ruby, the more the merrier,” he said. “Now go put your things away before I have to tickle-torture you into it, mi amor.”
Rosie groaned, leaning into Julian. “But, Daddy—”
He kneeled down in front of her. “Hey. What did we talk about? When we get to new places, we put our stuff away. It’s not just polite, it helps us later when we’re looking for them.”
Rosie glared at him for a second, then looked at me. As if I was going to contradict him.
“He’s right, mi amor. Do it.”
Ruby groaned, but did as we told her. Once she was out of earshot, Julian sat on the edge of the bed. “I assume we have a little time until Alek gets here. Why was there a work truck leaving the house this morning? They were pulling out as we pulled in.”
Fuck. The window.
“I…uh,” I said, looking away from him. “I got home by myself. Blacked out. I must’ve thrown something through the window. I wanted to fix it before Rosie got here.”
“You blacked out?”
“I did celebratory shots,” I replied, too quickly. “By myself. Like an idiot.”
He shook his head as he looked at me. “And no one else was here?”
“Yes,” I said. “No one.”
“You have clearly just fucked someone on this bed.”
I had to do my best to keep my breathing steady. “I, uh,” I tried to buy myself sometime. “I’ve been crushing on the window guy since I saw him working on the neighbor’s house. I, uh, got drunk last night and called him.”
“So nothing happened to the window?”
“No, I threw a rock through it. I was drunk. Couldn’t think of an excuse.”
“So you called his company? In the middle of the night?”
“No, his phone. I had his phone from before. I told him I broke a window. Look, it wasn’t my best moment. I just won the election. I let it get to me. Overwhelm me.”
Julian cocked his head. “Whose house were they working on when you met him?”
I blinked. “What? Oh, I’m not—not super sure. Mrs. Souter’s, maybe? I can’t remember.”
“Right. Okay,” Julian said after a beat. “I’m just going to go get the rest of Rosie’s things out of the car then I’ll get going. I have court today so I should go prepare. Are you going to be alright?”
“Yes. Fine. Alek and I will take her out to breakfast. What’s going on?”
“Same bullshit, different day,” Julian sighed.
“The client is claiming the IP should revert under the termination clause, but there’s no surviving obligations in the merger agreement.
The defendant’s a multinational, risk-averse, wanted a clean settlement.
But my guy insists on litigation. Says it’s about optics. ”
I grimaced. “Oh, you hate those guys. Does that mean it’s not about the money?”
“No, it’s always about the money. But he thinks the PR play is worth more than the actual claim. I tried to walk him back, but no dice. So now I’m stuck pretending that this isn’t a complete waste of court resources for the next few weeks, if I’m lucky. Could be months. Hopefully not years.”
I cocked my head. “I thought you said we were taking Rosie for breakfast. What changed?”
Julian just looked at me. Really looked at me. Then his gaze dropped—to my neck.
My stomach twisted.
And then he sighed.
“It seems like you had a horrible night. You looked like you were about to sob when Rosie greeted you. I’ve only ever seen you have that look on your face that time Rosie crashed her bike in Medellin. When we thought…”
He trailed off, shaking his head.
I swallowed hard, the memory still sharp in my mind. “She was fine.”
“She had a fractured skull, Ruby. We didn’t know if she was going to recover.”
“Yes, but she was fine.”
“I know,” he said. “But we didn’t know that at the time. You were so scared I had to talk to the doctors alone and you know my Spanish sucks.”
I smiled, despite myself. He wasn’t being snarky. He still sounded scared too.
“Your Spanish doesn’t suck.”
“Tell that to your mom. I can still hear her making fun of me in my head,” he said.
I started to relax. Started to believe he was going to let it go.
His expression changed. Tensed.
Then his gaze landed on my throat again before he spoke. “If he choked you, Ruby, we can still report him. If he went too far…”
“What?” I asked, trying to process what he’d just said.
“The bruises on your neck are so bad,” he said. “If it started as a thing you were both into and then it went too far…I mean, you told me how many of those cases you had to drop as ADA.”
"Julian, I can’t—this isn’t—I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say. He was so worried about me.
And for what? I could never tell him the truth.
“It wasn’t a good night. But I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“I mean it,” I said, hating the silence.
Julian exhaled slowly. “If you change your mind, I’m just…I didn’t want to tell you like this, but I started to see someone and she’s actually in charge of the ER at General. She’s an administrator there. You want to see someone, you just let me know,” he hesitated. “If you need anything else…”
I latched onto the the shift in conversation like a lifeline.
“It sounds like you like her,” I said quickly.
He studied me for a beat before answering. “I do. She’s sweet,” he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m waiting to see if things get more serious before I introduce her to Rosie.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“I think I can skip prep today,” Julian said. “I mean, I’m as prepared as I’m going to be for this shitshow. Why do they pay me so much if they never listen to me?”
“I never listen to you and I don’t pay you anything,” I said, nudging him playfully with my shoulder.
He laughed, nudging my shoulder back. It felt normal for a second.
Then he sobered again.
“Oh, speaking of. Do you need money for the window guy? Not the, uh, guy. The actual repair. He did repair it, right?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about that.”
“Okay,” he said. “But if there is anything else I do need to worry about, you’d tell me, right? If not for my sake, for Rosie’s?”
I bit back the angry retort I immediately thought of.
“I would never do anything to jeopardize Rosie’s safety.”
“I know,” he said. Quietly. Seriously. He got up, brushed himself off.
Then, just before he turned to leave the room, he looked right at me.
“I hope that includes keeping her mom safe, too.”