“What’s wrong?” he says, his voice low. “Did you have the dream again?”

A sniffle. “It was different this time.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Silence, where I can imagine her shaking her head no.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep?”

“I’m afraid,” the small voice says, and my heart wrenches. This is the part that Noah doesn’t understand. Grief does not care whether you’re rich or poor.

It hurts us equally.

I step into the room then, and Mr. Rochester’s head half-turns to see me. “Do you want Ms. Mendoza to sit with you?”

There’s another wrench in my heart. Because he sounds so uncertain. It’s clear in this moment that whatever asshole things he says to me, he does care about this little girl.

“I want you both,” she says, so I sit down on the floor against the wall. I leave him to be the one to smooth her hair back from her forehead and check if she has enough water by her bedside.

She’s a small lump under the covers.

He sits on the edge of the bed.

“Do you want me to read a book to you?”

She shakes her head.

“Are you sure? I can pull something up on my Kindle. Investing Common Stocks or Fundamentals of Index Funds. I can have you asleep in minutes.”

She giggles. “No, Uncle Beau.”

“Then what should we talk about?”

“Mama used to sing to me,” she says, her voice shy.

There’s a long silence, and I tense, knowing that Beau Rochester has a thousand sharp words in his mouth. He could slice her to ribbons without meaning to. “A song, huh?”

She nods.

“I’m not sure I even remember how to sing,” he says slowly. “It’s been a long time since I sang anything at all. What would your mother sing to you?”

“Taylor Swift.”

He lets out a low laugh. “I definitely don’t know the words to her songs.”

“Well then, what songs do you know?”

I eye him dubiously. What kind of music does a man like Mr. Rochester listen to? Hard rock? Heavy metal? It matches his intensity, but I can’t quite imagine him rocking out. Maybe something more adult. Classical music. Opera? That would fit his wealth and this outrageous mansion, but he seems too primitive to appreciate those things.

Maybe it’s the water banging against the rocks that’s his music. Something elemental.

“There was a light far away,” his voice comes low and soothing. “I followed the water’s gift. But when the night turned to day, I ended up adrift.”

“What’s that from?” she asks.

“An old fishing song.” He murmurs the answer as if sharing a confession. “Our father was a lobsterman. He would come home and dance with our mother around the room.”