Chapter 24
Grace
It was a Monday afternoon, more than six weeks after Leo had been violently brought into the world.
“Hi, Sarah,” I said to a familiar nurse as I walked directly toward the stainless steel washing station and dropped my bag on the corner of her desk. “Is he awake today?”
Sarah looked up from her illuminated computer monitor, her expression shifting rapidly from professional focus to sudden, intensely uncomfortable confusion. “Grace. What are you doing here?”
I frowned, freezing with my soapy hands under the warm running water. “I came to read to him before my shift. Is something wrong?”
“He’s not here, honey,” Sarah said gently, her voice dropping.
The water continued to run over my hands, pooling in the stainless steel sink, the rushing sound suddenly deafening.
“What do you mean, he’s not here?” I asked, a cold spike of pure panic hitting my chest. “Did-did his oxygen drop again overnight?”
“No,” Sarah said quickly, coming around the edge of the desk.
She placed a reassuring, warm hand on my tense shoulder.
“No, he’s fine, Grace. He hit all his major developmental benchmarks early—he’s breathing on his own, and he’s taking a bottle like an absolute champ.
His last test cleared over the weekend, so the discharge got moved up suddenly, and his father asked us to handle it quietly.
He was officially discharged this morning at nine o’clock. His father came and took him home.”
He was gone.
I stood paralyzed at the sink, staring blindly at the sterile white tiles.
I had spent the last agonizing weeks building my entire fragile existence around incubator four.
I had meticulously negotiated my grueling shifts at the restaurant to ensure I could always be there for his afternoon feedings.
I had fallen hopelessly, irrevocably, and irrationally in love with a tiny boy who wasn’t mine to keep.
And now he was in the penthouse.
He was in the exact same massive, echoing penthouse I had fled.
I would never see him again.
I would never feel his tiny, rapid heartbeat against my collarbone. I would never get to see what color his eyes finally turned. I would never get to hear him laugh. My secret window of motherhood had closed as suddenly as it had opened.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to Sarah, my throat tight, unable to draw a full breath.
I turned the water off, blindly grabbed a rough paper towel, and practically ran out of the neonatal unit.
The rest of the day was an agonizing, hollow blur of suffocating grief.
I stumbled mechanically through my dinner shift at L’étoile, unmoored by the sudden, massive void in my life.
I wasn’t just grieving my marriage anymore; I was actively grieving a child.
I burned my forearm twice on the salamander grill, nearly chopped the tip of my finger off dicing shallots, and ruined a massive, expensive batch of béarnaise sauce by letting the butter break.
Chef Margaux finally walked over to my station, grabbed my wrist, and took the chef’s knife out of my trembling hand.
“Go home,” she said, her voice surprisingly gentle for a woman who routinely screamed at grown men. “Do not come back to my kitchen until you are actually ready to cook.”
I took the subway back to Queens in a daze, collapsed fully clothed onto the sofa in my dark apartment, and stared blankly at the silent television screen.
It was over in every way but the paperwork. The divorce lawyers were moving forward. Adrian had surrendered the chairmanship to Nolan. Celine Dubois was buried. And Leo was gone. The complicated, toxic board had been cleared.
A little after midnight my cell phone rang.
It vibrated against the cheap wood of the coffee table, a jarring, aggressive sound in the silent apartment. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen—he’d surrendered the company phone along with the firm—but I answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Grace.”
It was Adrian.
His voice was a raw, jagged, bleeding rasp, stripped of its usual commanding cadence and corporate polish. He sounded wrecked. He sounded genuinely terrified.
“Adrian?” I sat up quickly, my heart hammering painfully against my ribs, the exhaustion instantly vanishing. “What’s wrong? Is it Leo? Is he okay? Did you have to take him back to the hospital?”
“He’s fine,” Adrian said quickly, his breath catching audibly in his throat. “He’s physically fine. His vitals are good. But I...Grace, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I closed my eyes, the absolute, naked desperation in his voice tearing directly through the last of my carefully constructed defenses.
“I hired a night nanny,” Adrian continued, the words tumbling out of him in a panicked, frantic rush.
“She’s a highly recommended, elite professional.
But I don’t trust her. I don’t trust her at all.
She’s so cold, Grace. She handles him like he’s a piece of fragile, expensive machinery, not a child.
He’s been crying for two solid hours, and she scowls every time I pick him up because she says he needs to learn to self-soothe to build discipline.
He’s a premature infant! He doesn’t need to self-soothe! He needs...”
He broke off, a sharp, suppressed, agonizing sob echoing loudly through the receiver.
“I need you,” Adrian whispered, the admission costing him the very last of his pride. “Please. I know I have no right to ask. But please. Just for tonight. I don’t know who else to call.”
He didn’t have anyone else to call.
His family was useless when it came to the kind of love and support the parent of a premature newborn needed. He had no genuine friends, only strategic corporate alliances that were useless at midnight with a screaming newborn.
I didn’t think about all of his lies. I didn’t strategically weigh the pros and cons of returning to the scene of the crime. I didn’t make a decision.
I was just moving.
“I’m on my way,” I said, grabbing my keys off the counter and flying out the front door.
I hailed a cab on Queens Boulevard, urging the driver to break every single speed limit across the Queensboro Bridge to TriBeCa. I blew past the startled night doorman, took the private elevator up, and punched in the security override code with shaking fingers.
The heavy oak doors slid smoothly open.
The penthouse was exactly as I had left it. The expensive modern art and the polished hardwood floors gleamed under the recessed lighting. But the museum-like silence was broken by the sharp, desperate, frantic wails of an infant.
I dropped my keys heavily on the marble console table and walked quickly down the long hallway toward the room Adrian and I had picked out as a nursery.
The door was wide open.
Adrian was standing rigidly in the center of the nursery. He was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and looked exhausted and dangerously tense.
Standing opposite him was a severe-looking woman in her late fifties, her gray hair pulled into a tight bun, wearing a crisp, practical uniform. The elite night nanny.
“Mr. Wright, you are directly interfering with the established, proven routine,” the nanny said. Her voice was sharp, brittle, and devoid of warmth. “If you coddle him every single time he cries, you will immediately create a negative dependency. He must learn independence.”
“He spent the first six weeks of his life fighting to breathe in a plastic box!” Adrian yelled, his volume causing Leo’s frantic cries to instantly escalate. “He is not a machine you can program!”
“It’s never too soon for structure and discipline, Mr. Wright,” the nanny countered smoothly. “And frankly, your highly emotional state is extremely disruptive to his—”
“Pack your bags,” I said, stepping fully into the nursery.
Both Adrian and the nanny whipped their heads around in shock.
“Excuse me?” the nanny snapped, immediately bristling at the intrusion. “Who are you?”
“I’m his mother,” I said smoothly. It wasn’t even a lie yet—not until the paperwork went through.
The absolute, unyielding conviction in my voice left no room for argument. I pointed a steady finger toward the nursery door. “Pack your bags. You’re fired. Get out of my house.”
The nanny looked sharply from me to Adrian, clearly searching for a contradiction, a sign that I was a crazy person who had slipped past security.
Adrian just stared at me. His chest was heaving, his dark eyes wide with shock and a profound, staggering relief. He didn’t contradict me. He didn’t blink.
“This is highly unprofessional,” the nanny huffed, her face flushing an angry, mottled red, but the bitch wasn’t moving.
My voice dropped to the lethal, quiet tone I had learned from Adrian. “You have exactly five minutes to vacate the premises before I have building security forcefully escort you out.”
She recognized a losing battle. She gathered her clipboard, sniffed disdainfully, and left the room.
The second the front door of the penthouse clicked shut, I crossed the nursery to the massive, expensive crib.
Leo was red-faced, his tiny fists clenched tight, his cries bordering on frantic exhaustion.
I scooped him up carefully, pressing his small, warm body securely against my chest, expertly supporting his fragile head.
“Shh,” I murmured, immediately falling into the gentle, rhythmic sway I had practiced in the hospital rocking chair. “It’s okay, little one. You’re okay. I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
The effect was almost instantaneous. As soon as his ear pressed against my chest and he recognized the familiar rhythm of my heartbeat, the frantic, panicked wailing subsided into short, exhausted, hiccuping sobs.
He burrowed his tiny face against my collarbone, letting out a long, shuddering sigh of pure relief.
I closed my eyes tightly, burying my face in his soft hair, the agonizing, hollow ache in my chest finally, mercifully easing.
I slowly opened my eyes and looked up.
Adrian was watching me.