“Then I’m overqualified,” you say.
The first night they stay in your house, no one sleeps.
It takes less than twelve hours to transform your home from architectural magazine spread into emergency nursery. Your assistant orders cribs, bottles, formula, diapers, outlet covers, children’s clothes, and every age-inappropriate stuffed animal available within thirty miles because panic shopping is still shopping. Naomi sends over a lactation consultant’s number, a list of infant warning signs, and three pages of instructions that make a hostile takeover look breezy.
Addie refuses the bedroom prepared for her and instead falls asleep in the rocking chair beside Lily’s bassinet, one hand threaded through the bars like a prisoner refusing to release the key.
At three in the morning, Lily wakes with a feverish whimper.
You freeze for one useless second before Naomi’s instructions roar back to life in your head. Bottle. Burp cloth. Temperature check. Slow rocking. You move through it all with the intense concentration of someone defusing a bomb built out of milk and panic. Addie wakes halfway through, sees the baby in your arms, and nearly launches herself across the room before Lily settles against your chest.
Then Addie stops.
You are standing barefoot in a hallway at three in the morning, hair wrecked, tie gone, feeding an infant who is not yours while moonlight pools across imported hardwood floors your interior designer once described as museum-grade. It is, objectively, a ridiculous image.
For the first time, Addie lets out something close to a laugh. Small, rusty, unbelieving.
“You look stupid,” she mutters.
You glance down at the bottle, the spit-up cloth over your shoulder, the baby gripping your finger. “That makes two of us. I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Three,” she says, and touches Lily’s foot. “She doesn’t either.”
The sound Lily makes after that is not a cry. It is almost a sigh.
The days that follow are a strange new country.
Your staff does not know where to look at first. The housekeeper starts leaving child-friendly meals in the kitchen without comment. Your chef learns Addie likes grilled cheese cut into triangles because squares, apparently, are “for kindergarten psychos.” Vaughn installs cameras and upgraded locks while pretending not to notice the pink bottle warmer plugged in beside your Italian espresso machine.
Meanwhile Elena and Ruth pull at the threads of the case.
The stepfather’s name is Wade Colter. Prior arrests for assault, stolen vehicles, and possession. No convictions that stuck. Known associates include two men under investigation for forging documents and moving minors across state lines. Lily’s birth was never officially registered. Addie’s mother, Jenna, had isolated from friends and family years ago. The overdose case reopens when toxicology details fail to line up cleanly.
Every new fact feels like discovering another room in a house built over hell.
One afternoon Elena sits at your kitchen island while Addie does homework Ruth insisted on arranging.
“You know he’ll come looking,” Elena says.
“I know.”
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