Chapter 13
David
“You look less terrible than last week.”
“Thank you, Caleb. That’s exactly the kind of emotional support I was hoping for.”
“I’m serious.” My brother glances at me from the driver’s seat as we merge onto the expressway.
He insisted on driving, which means I’m in the passenger seat of his Jaguar with my briefcase on my lap and my jaw clenched, because my brother treats lane changes like a competitive sport.
“You’ve got color in your face. You’re wearing a tie that isn’t your funeral tie. Progress.”
“Navy is what was clean.”
“I’ll take it.” He checks his mirror, cuts across two lanes, and accelerates toward the exit for Dad’s office. “So. How’s the nanny search going?”
I was wondering when he’d ask. Caleb has been uncharacteristically restrained for the past four days—no follow-up texts, no pointed questions during our morning case reviews, no casually dropped observations about my emotional state.
Which means Serena told him to give me space, and Caleb listens to Serena, because Caleb is smart about exactly one relationship in his life.
“It’s sorted,” I say. “For now.”
“Sorted how?”
“Temporarily sorted. Bridge arrangement.”
“That’s not an answer, David. That’s a press release.”
I look out the window. The Chicago skyline is doing its thing—steel, glass, and ambition stacked against a gray October sky.
Traffic is moving. We’re twenty minutes from Dad’s office, which means I’m trapped in an enclosed space with the one person on this earth who can sniff out my bullshit simply because we were raised in the same house and our bullshit aligns.
“I have someone covering pickups and afternoons,” I say. “Three days a week. Possibly four. It’s structured. Michaela’s comfortable. That’s all that matters.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters if I’m co-counseling your custody case and need to know who has regular unsupervised access to your daughter.”
Damn. He’s right. And he knows he’s right, which is the worst part.
I rub my thumb along the edge of my briefcase. “It’s Nora.”
The car doesn’t swerve. Caleb doesn’t slam the brakes. He doesn’t even turn his head. He just . . . drives. For about five seconds. Which, in Caleb silence, is an eternity.
“Nora,” he repeats.
“Yes.”
“Nora Harrison.”
“Yes.”
“The principal.”
“I’m aware of her title.”
“The principal of your daughter’s school. Who is also your strongest potential character witness. Who is also the woman you definitely don’t have feelings for.”
“Caleb—”
“The one Dominic calls ‘the foxy principal with stars in her eyes’? That Nora?”
I say nothing as he merges onto the exit ramp.
“David. What the hell?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Tell me what I think. And then tell me what it actually is—let’s see how far apart they land.”
I stare at the dashboard. The clock reads 2:17. Dad’s expecting us at 2:30. Thirteen minutes to have a conversation that needs thirteen hours.
“Michaela called Nora from my phone while I was in the shower.”
Caleb blinks. “Michaela did what?”
“She stole my phone. Called Nora. Presented a nine-point proposal for Nora to become her temporary nanny. Cited Archimedes—that’s the dog—as a stakeholder.”
“She cited the dog.”
“As a stakeholder.”
“Where does she get this?”
“From you, apparently. You speak to her like she’s one of your associates, and she’s adapted.”
Caleb makes a sound that’s half laugh, half groan. “OK, so Michaela called Nora. And then what?”
“And then Nora asked to speak to me. We talked. She offered to help.”
“She offered.”
“Yes.”
“And you said?”
“I said yes. With conditions.”
The Jag glides to a stop at a red light. Caleb rests both hands on the wheel and turns to look at me with the full, undivided attention of a man about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.
“David.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I need to walk you through what this looks like from the outside.”
“I know what it looks like.”
“It looks like a single father in the middle of a contested custody case has installed his child’s school principal—a woman he has obvious personal feelings for—as his primary after-school caregiver.
It looks like blurred boundaries. It looks like exactly the kind of judgment call Kelsie’s attorneys are praying you’ll make. ”
The light turns green. Caleb doesn’t move. Someone behind us honks.
“Light’s green,” I say.
“I’m aware.” He still doesn’t move. “They will find out. You understand that, right? Kelsie’s team has people watching.
They’re building a picture of your life, David.
Every person who interacts with Michaela, every schedule change, every deviation from the norm.
If Principal Harrison starts doing regular school pickups and taking your daughter home three afternoons a week, someone is going to notice. ”
“I’ve thought about that.”
“And?”
“And we’re being careful. It’s a formal arrangement—written authorization on file with the school, limited schedule, clear boundaries.”
“Clear boundaries.” He sighs. “Has anything happened between you two?”
I don’t respond. The car behind us honks again.
Caleb stares at me for one beat, then another, then mutters, “Jesus Christ. You fucked her,” under his breath and finally takes his foot off the brake.
The Jaguar surges forward through the intersection.
“It was once,” I say, because apparently if I’m going to detonate my own life, I may as well do it with precision.
Caleb’s laugh is so disbelieving it barely qualifies as laughter. “Oh! Then that makes it OK, then.”
“It does when we both agreed it won’t ever happen again.”
He blows out a breath through his nose and changes lanes with the kind of clipped aggression that suggests the rest of the drive will be instructional. “When?”
“A little over a week ago.”
“And since then?”
“Nothing.”
“That pause was too long.”
“Nothing,” I repeat. “Not physically.”
He glances at me. “That is not a comforting qualifier.”
“It’s the accurate one.”
“Which means emotionally—”
“We are not discussing my emotional life on the Eisenhower.”
“We absolutely are, because you have somehow managed to combine your custody crisis, your childcare crisis, and your sexual repression into one spectacularly inadvisable arrangement.”
I look out the window again. “You always did know how to make a man feel supported.”
“I’m not trying to support you right now. I’m trying to stop you from handing Kelsie’s lawyers a loaded weapon.”
I know that. That’s the problem. Caleb at his most irritating is usually Caleb at his most correct.
He grips the wheel a little tighter.
“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he says, voice dropping. “I’m trying to protect your case.”
“I know.”
“And Michaela.”
“I know that too.”
“And, for what it’s worth, you. Because if this goes sideways and the judge gets wind of it, the best-case scenario is that it looks like poor judgment.
Worst case, it looks like you’re using your daughter’s principal as a stand-in mother for the benefit of the court. Like you’re constructing a narrative.”
The words hit somewhere deep and ugly. Not because they’re unfair—they’re not. They’re the exact argument I made to myself at three in the morning while staring at my ceiling, running every possible outcome through the risk matrix that lives permanently in my head.
“That’s not what this is,” I say.
“I believe you. A judge might not.”
We drive in silence. The skyline shifts as we move into the financial district—taller buildings, narrower streets, the density of Chicago’s legal quarter, where every third door is a law firm and the coffee shops charge nine dollars for a cortado.
“She’s good with Michaela,” I say eventually, and I hate how inadequate that sounds.
How small. Like I’m reducing something enormous to a performance review.
“Michaela trusts her. After everything that’s happened lately, Nora is the one person Michaela chose.
I said no more times than I can count. Because I know—I know—how this looks.
But Michaela looked at every adult in her life and picked the one who made her feel safe. How can I say no to that?”
Caleb doesn’t respond immediately. He’s processing—I can tell by the way his jaw works, the slight tightening of his hands on the wheel. He does this in court too: the brief silence before redirecting.
“She’s a child, David.”
“I’m aware.”
“Eight-year-olds don’t always know what’s best for them.”
“No. But they know who they trust. And after what Kelsie put her through, I’m not going to override that because it’s legally inconvenient.”
My voice comes out harder than I want. Louder.
The word override tastes like metal, and I realize, too late, that I’m not just arguing with Caleb.
I’m arguing with every version of myself that has spent the last few weeks running cost-benefit analyses on my daughter’s emotional wellbeing like she’s a variable in a case strategy.
“She called Nora because she was scared,” I say, and the rawness in my own voice catches me off guard.
“She didn’t call you. Or Mom. Or Logan. Or anyone else.
She called the woman who sat with her after Kelsie showed up and didn’t make her feel weird about it.
She called the person who gives her comfort.
And when Nora answered, Michaela presented her argument—because that’s what Kingsleys do when we’re terrified, we build a case—and every single point was about feeling safe.
Not about logistics. Not about convenience. About safety.”
The car is quiet.
“She’s scared all the time,” I say, quieter now.
“She won’t tell me because she thinks it’ll make things worse.
She performs fine for me the same way I perform fine for everyone else, and I taught her that, Caleb.
I taught my eight-year-old daughter that the way to handle fear is to pretend it doesn’t exist and build a wall around it. ”
Caleb pulls into the parking structure beneath Dad’s building. The fluorescent lights turn everything flat and shadowless. He kills the engine but doesn’t move to get out.
In the silence, I let myself think the thing I’ve been outrunning since Saturday night. I didn’t say yes just for Michaela. I said yes because Nora offered and I wanted to let her in, and wanting things is how everything falls apart.
“David.”
“What.”
“I hear you.” His voice is different now.
He’s dropped the attorney act and the sparring partner.
Now he’s just my brother. The man who held Michaela when she had colic at three weeks old while I sat on the kitchen floor unable to stop shaking because Kelsie had been on a bender for two days and I didn’t know if she was coming back.
“I hear all of that. And you’re right—Michaela’s safety matters more than legal optics. ”
“But.”
“But we’re about to walk into Dad’s office and discuss witness strategy for a hearing that’s less than four weeks away, and I need to know you’re thinking clearly. Not with your heart. Not with your—” He stops himself.
“Finish that sentence.”
“Not with anything except Michaela’s best interest.”
“That is her best interest. Nora is her best interest. It’s why I said yes.”
What I don’t say is that I’ve just broken the only rule I’ve trusted since Kelsie left.
There’s no clause in the Kingsley operating manual for this—letting someone inside the perimeter because your daughter chose her and you couldn’t, in good conscience, say no.
I’m, apparently, writing a new one. Out loud. In my brother’s car.
Caleb looks at me for a long moment.
“OK,” he says. “Then we disclose. Keep it clean. Formal. Nothing that can be mischaracterized. And David?”
“Yeah?”
“If Dad asks about childcare arrangements—and he will—you give him the facts. No omissions. No creative framing. He needs to know, because if it comes up in court and he’s blindsided, we lose credibility we can’t afford to lose.”
“I’m not telling him I slept with her.”
Caleb’s eyebrows go up. “I didn’t say you had to submit a notarized list of your sins, David. I said don’t lie to the man leading your custody case.”
“There’s a difference between lying and declining to volunteer deeply irrelevant information about my private life.”
“Is it irrelevant?”
I glare at him. “For the purposes of whether Nora can pick up Michaela from school three afternoons a week? Yes.”
“For the purposes of whether opposing counsel could use that relationship to imply compromised judgment?”
Relationship. The word lands with enough force that I feel it in my sternum.
“There’s no relationship,” I say.
Caleb gives me a look. A long one. “You slept with her.”
“Once.”
“You keep saying once like it’s a legal doctrine.”
“Because apparently repetition is the only way to get basic facts through your skull.”
He leans back against the headrest and exhales through his nose. “Jesus. OK. Fine. Then we don’t lead with I’m secretly in love with my daughter’s principal.”
“I am not secretly in love with anyone.”
“That is, somehow, less convincing than the one-time sex.”
I reach for the door handle before I say something I’ll regret. “Are we done?”
“No.” He opens his own door and gets out. “But Dad’s billing in six-minute increments even when he’s family—so let’s continue this nightmare upstairs.”