When it came to the parent thing, Jacqueline had gotten better over the years, but she’d never had and never would have this kind of love for her children. Not her fault. It was the way she was built: for creating empires and being CEO.

The problem was that instead of falling in love with men who loved children and would do the heavy lifting in the parenting department, she’d picked Stefán, followed by Clive. Her current husband, Oliver, a man Jacqueline had married after her daughters were too old for it to matter, was actually a gentler, kinder sort of man, but Ísa’s dad was also an empire-builder while Catie’s was… less than reliable.

Leaving no safety net for Jacqueline’s daughters.

Back after that truck ran onto the curb and crushed Catie’s legs, her mother had turned up at the hospital. Of course she had. Jacqueline wasn’t a monster. But she’d disappeared the minute the doctors pronounced that Catie was out of the woods.

Jacqueline wasn’t a keeping-vigil-by-a-hospital-bed-type person.

It was Clive who’d taken that role. Her flake of a father hadn’t let her down at that critical time in her life, when she’d been so afraid and hurt, her dreams of a running career in apparent tatters at the ends of where her legs should’ve been.

That was why she could still love him even though he’d broken her heart so many times. Because she remembered waking up from sedation after yet another surgery to find always-spick-and-span Clive passed out in the hospital chair, unshaven and wearing dirty clothes.

He hadn’t missed a single hospital day, had spent hours keeping her entertained and laughing. But it was Ísa who’d been there for the months and years of rehabilitation that followed, Ísa who’d come to all the appointments with the prosthetic specialists, Ísa who’d made sure Catie didn’t derail her progress by attempting to skip stages.

Jacqueline, in contrast, had paid to have Clive’s entire home reconfigured so Catie could navigate it. She’d also set in motion the beginnings of a company to build cutting-edge prostheses. Looking after Catie in her own way—just not the way so desperately needed by the wounded child Catie had been.

Her mother was a complicated woman.

“We’ll be on the first flight out,” Joseph said toward the end of their call. “Make sure you get some hot drink and food into you since you’re staying up with Danny, or you’ll be answering to me.”

Catie’s eyes burned. “Yes, sir.”

Slipping the phone back into her pocket, she swallowed hard. “I hope you know how lucky you are, hotshot.” All those people, ready to drop their lives to come to him. The surreal thing was that they’d do it for her too.