7. Megan
— ? —
Megan
We move into Gray’s apartment the morning after the text.
He doesn’t frame it as a request.
He shows up at the rented two-bedroom I took when the revenge started, the modest one, a short drive from Bradley’s city where I brought Charlotte the month I decided to do this.
Close enough to fight from. Far enough that a vetted sitter and three deadbolts felt like cover on the nights I pretended on Gray’s arm.
He stands in my doorway with his hands in his pockets.
“They’ve been near her once. They won’t get a second time.”
I open my mouth to argue.
“Come to my place. Both of you. There’s a doorman who’s worked for me for nine years. Cameras on every floor. One elevator that needs a key I control.”
A pause.
“I’m not asking because of the other night. I’d offer it to a stranger. I’m offering it to you.”
“Your building is across the park from Bradley’s.”
“Three hundred yards from him. Behind security his family can’t bribe or sweet-talk.” The corner of his mouth moves. “Which is the last place on earth they’d think to look.”
He holds my gaze.
“Hide the girl under the dragon’s nose. He’ll search the whole kingdom first.”
I know I should argue with him. Literally everything I’ve done over the last few years has been about avoiding this exact setup. I’ve made a point of turning down help, staying out of rooms where I don’t call the shots, and making sure I don’t owe anyone a single favor.
I look at Charlotte’s shoes by the door.
For once, I let someone else carry the weight of the locks.
I say yes.
***
Gray’s apartment is expensive in that quiet way that doesn’t feel the need to flex.
You won’t find any tacky gold plating or marble lobbies. It’s just massive ceilings, great lighting, and huge windows that look out over the whole park. The rooms actually feel lived in, like someone put them together to enjoy them rather than just for show.
By Lawson standards, it’s almost humble. Bradley’s family could buy this whole twenty-floor building and not notice the charge on the statement.
But it’s warm and it locks. And a man stands downstairs whose entire job is to know who belongs.
Charlotte loses her mind over it.
“Mama.” She stands in the middle of the living room turning in a slow circle, head tipped back at the ceiling that goes up and up. “Castle.”
“It’s an apartment, bug.”
“Castle apartment.”
She has decided. Charlotte’s decisions are final.
She runs to the window and presses both palms and her whole face to the glass.
“Trees.” She spins around. “We stay here?”
“For a little while.”
“No. Stay more,” she corrects me.
I let her have it. I have spent her whole life letting her have the small soft lies that don’t cost anything.
Gray is in the kitchen doorway watching her. I catch the look on his face before he tucks it away.
He’s a man who built a fortress and never once imagined a child’s handprints on the glass of it.
Charlotte finds him properly an hour later.
After the bags are in and the chaos has settled, she walks right up to where he’s crouched, plugging in a nightlight and tilts her head at him with the terrifying directness of a small person who has not yet learned that you’re supposed to pretend.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Gray.” He doesn’t stand up. He stays down at her level.
“I’m your mom’s friend.”
She studies him. “Do you have snacks?”
“Charlotte-” I start to apologize.
Gray lifts a hand to her. Like they’re conducting important business and I’m interrupting.
“What kind of snacks are we talking about?” Completely serious. “Because that matters.”
She leans in, conspiratorial. “Mama only has orange circles.”
“Rice cakes.” He says it with grave sympathy. “I’m sorry. That’s a hard way to grow up.”
He stands, finally. Holds out his hand to her.
She takes it without a beat of hesitation.
This child I taught to be careful, who takes a near-stranger’s hand because his face told her he was safe before her mother could decide whether he was.
“I happen to have a drawer,” he says. “A whole drawer. Just cookies. But I have an important question first.”
“Yeah?”
“Chocolate chip or any cookie?”
She considers it.
“Any cookies.” A pause. “I get two.”
“Two.” Gray nods slowly, like she’s negotiated him into a corner. “A businesswoman. I should’ve brought my lawyer.”
I have to sit down on the arm of his expensive couch.
My heart is misbehaving in a way it has no right to. I don’t trust my knees.
It goes like that for the rest of the day. And the day after. And the one after that.
Nobody warns you how fast a child folds a new person into the shape of normal.
By the third night he knows she won’t eat anything if the foods are touching. By the fourth he’s learned that Mr. Big Ears, a rabbit missing one button eye, must face the door when she sleeps or the night doesn’t work.
He builds a pillow fort with structural integrity I find frankly insulting, given how many of mine have collapsed.
When she demands he be the dragon, he gets down on the floor and roars badly enough to make her shriek and well enough to make her believe.
“A bad dragon,” she informs him, delighted, sitting on his back.
“I’m an excellent dragon. You’re just a very brave knight.”
“Mama, look!”
“I see that,” I say from the doorway.
My voice does something.
Gray’s eyes come up to find mine over the top of my daughter’s head. For a second neither of us is pretending for anyone. There’s no crowd. No plan.
Just a man on the floor of his fortress with my child on his back, looking at me like I’m the thing he’s been protecting all along.
This is the part I wasn’t braced for.
The revenge I could handle. Bradley’s groveling, Eleanor’s threats, Dixie’s insults. I had armor for all of it.
I did not have armor for watching my daughter get tucked in by a man who learned which way the rabbit faces.
For her saying, on the fifth night, small and matter-of-fact as she went down, “Gray’s the best friend.”
For the way nobody has ever filled the shape in her life that he’s filling without being asked.
She has never had this. A man who gets down on the floor.
I gave her a safe small life at the far edge of the map and then dragged it back here for a war. Through all of it, I could never give her this.
Watching her have it cracks open a thing in me I welded shut.
Later, after she’s down, Gray finds me at the window with the park dark below.
“You’re crying,” he says.
“I’m not.”
I am.
“She’s never had a dad. Not even a pretend one. I made sure of it. Cleaner that way.” I wipe my face with the heel of my hand. “And you walk in and ruin three years of very careful work in a week.”
“I’m not pretending with her either.”
He stands beside me. Not touching, letting me choose it.
“I want you to know that. Whatever this turns into. I’m not performing the dad thing for anyone.”
A pause.
“I just like her. She’s the best person in this apartment by a wide margin.” His voice softens. “And the competition includes you.”
I lean into him.
We stand there a long time, watching the park. For one whole evening, the war feels like it’s happening to other people.
***
The war does not stay happening to other people.
The next afternoon, while Charlotte naps in the room Gray cleared for her, I make myself do the thing I’ve been circling since the text.
I sit at Gray’s kitchen island. Set my phone flat on the marble between us. Put it on speaker.
And call Dixie.
She answers on the second ring. Which tells me she’s been waiting.
“Stay away from my daughter.”
“Or what?”
The honey is gone from her voice now that no one’s watching her use it.
“She was never good enough for him, you know. A nobody secretary who got lucky once and decided she was a queen.” A pause. “And you. Hiding a child like a dirty little secret in some rented box.”
Gray’s hand flattens on the marble. I shake my head at him.
Let her talk.
“The daycare photo,” I say. “That was you.”
“Prove it.”
Then the real venom.
“Here’s the truth, Megan, since you’re too slow to see it yourself. Bradley doesn’t even want the brat. He wouldn’t know what to do with a toddler.”
Her voice drops.
“Eleanor wants her. An only heir to the family business after Bradley. And the second I hand that woman an address, you will never out-lawyer her. Not in a thousand years.”
She lets that land.
“So crawl back to wherever you’ve been hiding and stay small. Or I will make sure you lose every single thing twice.”
My hand shakes around the edge of the counter.
My voice does not.
“You just threatened a child.” I keep my tone even. “On a recorded line.”
Silence.
“Sleeping your way into a directorship is a tabloid story, Dixie. People survive those.” I lean toward the phone. “Threatening a two-year-old by name is the kind of thing that ends a person completely.”
I let that sit.
“Ask yourself if Bradley will stand in front of that for you. Or whether you’ll be the next woman his family pays to disappear.”
Silence on the line. I can hear that I’ve landed it.
Then Dixie comes back. Uglier. The last card she has.
“She’ll never love you the way she loves him, you know. Blood’s blood. That little girl is half Bradley and she always will be. One day she’ll go looking for him.”
“And Gray? Gray’s just the consolation prize you grabbed on your way down. He always was.” Her voice turns venomous. “Ask him.”
The line goes dead.
Gray reaches over and picks up my phone. Saves the recording with two taps, his face very still.
“That,” he says quietly, “was the single stupidest thing she has ever done. And she once dated me while planning to leave me.”
He sets the phone down.
“We have her threatening Charlotte in her own voice. We don’t even have to be careful anymore.” His eyes meet mine. “Are you okay?”
“No.” I press both hands flat to the cool marble. “But I will be. The consolation prize line was beneath even her.”
“It was.”
He says it lightly. But his jaw is tight.
“For the record, I have never in my life felt less like a consolation anything.”
***
That night I almost let myself believe we’re winning.
Charlotte goes down easy, Mr. Big Ears facing the door.
Gray and I end up on the floor of the living room with the lights low and the park spread out below. My head on his shoulder.
“When this is done,” he says into my hair. “When it’s done, what do you want?”
No one has asked me what I really want.
“I want a Tuesday,” I say. “A boring one. Nobody watching. Charlotte at a real school with her own name on the cubby. Me doing somebody’s taxes.” I look up at him. “You coming home and asking what’s for dinner like it’s the most important question in the world.”
“That’s it? Taxes and Tuesdays?”
“That’s the whole dream.” My voice catches. “You have no idea how big it is until they take it from you.”
He’s quiet.
Then, “I can do Tuesdays. I’m very good at Tuesdays, actually. I might also need a new bookkeeper. It’s galas I’m tired of.”
I laugh, and he tips my chin up, and he’s about to kiss me, and that’s when the intercom buzzes.
Both of us go still.
It’s nearly midnight. Nobody buzzes up at nearly midnight.
It goes again, longer, someone leaning on it downstairs with the flat of their hand, and a third time, and Gray is already on his feet and crossing to the panel by the door, and when he thumbs it the doorman’s careful voice comes through strained at the edges.
“Mr. Viktor, I’m sorry, sir. There are two people in the lobby refusing to leave. They don’t have your floor key and they won’t take no. The gentleman is, ah. He’s becoming difficult.”
Under the doorman’s voice, behind it, closer to the lobby panel than he should be allowed, another voice climbs into the speaker, a voice I’d know in my sleep, raised to a register I’ve never once heard from him in all our years, furious and breaking apart at the edges.
“WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?”
Bradley. And behind him, a second voice that doesn’t need to shout to be heard.
Eleanor.
They found us under the dragon’s nose after all.