I don’t answer him, because he wants me to say yes—yes, I’ll let him protect me. Yes, I’ll let him protect us. And I’m not going to say that. I’m not going to say it because I know this much is true: he can’t.

Nicholas can probably get to us anyway, if that’s what he wants to do. That’s what this all has taught me. One way or another, things come back. Things just came back. So I may as well take a shot at doing the best thing for Bailey. And, by doing it this way, Bailey gets to stay Bailey.

No one gave her that choice before. She is already losing so much. The least I can do is give it to her now.

Grady starts the car up again, heads back into traffic. “You can’t trust him. It’s crazy for you to think you can. You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.”

I turn away from him, look out the window. “Except I just did.”

Finding My Way Back to Her

Bailey sits in the conference room. She is crying hard.

And before I even reach for her, she jumps up and races toward me. She holds tightly to me, her head in the crook of my neck.

I hold her like that, ignoring Grady, ignoring everything but her. She pulls away, and I take in her face, her eyes swollen from crying, her hair sticking to her head. She looks like the little girl version of herself, needing more than anything for someone to tell her that she is safe now.

“I shouldn’t have left the room,” she says.

I push her hair off her face. “Where did you go?”

“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she says. “I’m sorry. But I thought I heard a knock on the door, which completely freaked me out. And then my cell phone rang and I picked it up. And there was all this static. I kept saying hello and getting that static. And so I went into the hall to see if I could hear any better, and I don’t know…”

“You kept going?” I say.

She nods.

Grady shoots me a look, like I’m out of bounds to comfort her. Like I’m simply out of bounds. This is how he sees things now. His plan for Owen and Bailey is on one side of a line and I’m on the other. This is the only way he sees me now—as the main impetus toward his imagined solution.