"She'll retaliate. Make accusations about your employees."
"Let her try. We have security footage of every common area showing nothing inappropriate." I stared out at the darkening grounds. "Dig into her family's finances, Miles. The Whitmores have been hemorrhaging money for years; that's why she married me in the first place. I was the financial life raft, the social catapult. Find the pressure points."
"This is going to get ugly."
"It's already ugly. I'm just done pretending otherwise."
After I hung up, I stood at the window as twilight crept across the lawn. The memory of Millie's laughter felt like a dreamnow. The memory of Claire's shattered face was the waking nightmare.
I'm staying for Millie. Just Millie.
Her words echoed. A boundary. A warning. A kindness… she was protecting us both from something neither of us was ready to explore.
But I couldn't pretend anymore that my fight was only about freeing Millie from Victoria. Somewhere between the tickle war and the devastation in Claire's eyes, the stakes had shifted beneath my feet.
I wasn't just fighting to protect my daughter.
I was fighting to keep someone who had started to feel like the missing piece in my family, I hadn't known I was looking for.
And Victoria had just declared open war on exactly that.
Whatever it took. Whatever it costs.
I'd burn it all down before I let her win.
8.Claire
Here's the thing about catching feelings for your employer: it doesn't happen all at once. It happens in tiny, treacherous increments that you don't notice until you're already drowning.
The week after Victoria's attack had been... different. Quieter. Nathaniel had started appearing more, not hovering, exactly, but present in ways he hadn't been before. He'd pop into the morning room during lessons to "check on progress," lingering in the doorway while Millie showed him her latest project. He'd started coming home earlier, joining us for the last thirty minutes of the afternoon session.
"You don't have to babysit us," I'd told him on Wednesday, after he'd spent twenty minutes pretending to review emails while Millie and I worked on fractions.
"I'm not babysitting." He'd looked up from his phone, something unreadable in his expression. "I'm... observing."
"Observing what?"
"Progress."
"Millie's progress or mine?"
The corner of his mouth had twitched. "Both."
It was infuriating, but not in the way you’d hate someone for it, rather I wanted to find a way to presshisbuttons for a change.
By Thursday, Millie had noticed the shift too. "Daddy's home a lot now," she'd observed during our reading time.
"Is that okay with you?"
"Yeah." She'd smiled, small and hopeful. "It's nice. He used to always be at work."
"People change sometimes," I'd said carefully. "Sometimes they realize what's important."
"Miss Claire…” She'd looked up at me with those serious gray-blue eyes, her father's eyes. "Do you think Daddy's lonely?"
The question had caught me off guard. "Why do you ask?"
"Because he only has one friend, Uncle James… and he looks at you the way he looked at mommy."
