The billionaire told his son "walk to the person you love most" — and the whole room went silent when the boy walked past three gorgeous women and straight into the arms of… See more

Chapter 2 — Fourteen Months of Nights

Adrian did not sleep that night.

At three in the morning, he found himself outside the nursery, hand resting on the door he so rarely opened. Through the gap he could see Grace asleep in the worn armchair beside the crib, still in her uniform, one hand draped through the bars so her fingers touched Leo's back. She had not gone to her own room. She had stayed, the way you stay when staying is simply what you do.

He stood there a long time.

In the morning, he did something he hadn't done in a year. He cancelled his meetings.

He found Grace in the kitchen at six, already up, already feeding Leo mashed banana while the boy banged a spoon and shrieked with joy. When she saw Adrian in the doorway — in a sweater instead of a suit — she shot to her feet.

"Sir. I—breakfast isn't—"

"Sit down, Grace. Please."

She sat, uncertain, on the very edge of the chair.

"I want you to tell me about him," Adrian said, lowering himself across from her like a student. "Everything. What he likes. What he hates. What scares him. I want to know my son."

Grace stared at him. And then, slowly, carefully, she began.

She told him Leo hated the left sleeve of every shirt and would scream until you put the right arm in first. She told him Leo loved the sound of rain but was terrified of the vacuum, that he had a stuffed elephant named — well, named nothing, because he just called it "Bah" — and could not sleep without it. She told him Leo had said his first word four months ago.

Adrian went still. "His first word."

Grace hesitated. The truth was delicate and she knew it. "It was... 'Gace,'" she admitted, looking at her hands. "He couldn't say the R. I tried to teach him 'Dada.' I did try, sir. I'd point at your photograph every night and say it. He just—he says 'Gace.'"

Adrian closed his eyes. His son's first word had been her name, a botched, beloved version of her name, and he hadn't even been in the house to hear it.

"Why didn't anyone tell me?" he asked, but it came out without anger, because he already knew the answer. No one tells the king what he hasn't asked. He had built a household of efficient silence, and silence had grown up around his child like a wall.

"You were always working, sir," Grace said gently. There was no accusation in it, which somehow made it worse. "You loved him. I always saw that you loved him. You just... weren't here."

Over the following weeks, the manor changed in small, strange ways.

Adrian came home for dinner. Then he came home for bath time. He learned, badly at first, how to fold Leo's right arm into the sleeve before the left. He learned the elephant was named Bah and that Bah could not, under any circumstances, go in the laundry without a ceremony of reassurance. He sat on the floor — the billionaire, on the floor — and let his son stack blocks on his knee and knock them down again, screaming with the bottomless laughter of a child who has decided the whole world is a toy.

And always, Grace was there. Patient. Quiet. She taught him the way you teach someone you've decided to be kind to, even though they have the power to dismiss you with a word.

He started to notice things about her, too. The way she lit up doing something as small as catching Leo before a fall. The book of poetry tucked in her apron pocket on her breaks. The fact that she had a faint, careful accent he couldn't place, and hands that were rougher than a young woman's should be, and a watchfulness, a guardedness, as if she had learned the hard way that good things get taken.

One evening, after Leo was asleep, Adrian found her on the back terrace, staring at the dark gardens.

"You went to university," he said. It wasn't a question; he'd seen the way she read.

Grace's jaw tightened. "I did. Once. Before everything."

"Before what?"

She didn't answer. She only looked at him with eyes that held a whole history he hadn't earned the right to read yet, and said, "Goodnight, Mr. Reed."

But the three glamorous women were not finished. Vanessa, in particular, did not lose gracefully. And in a town this small and this hungry for scandal, a billionaire who sent home three socialites to keep a maid did not go unnoticed.