Chapter 2

　　"Mummy, you're squeezing my hand too hard."

　　"Sorry, baby." Bianca loosened her grip on Zoe's fingers but didn't let go. Not after last night. Not after a text that had her wide awake at 3am staring at the ceiling, turning the word daughter over and over until it stopped sounding like a word and started sounding like a threat with teeth.

　　The foundation building was glass from the ground floor up, the kind of place that made you feel underdressed just walking through the door. Bianca checked the letter in her bag one more time even though she'd read it a hundred times already. Meeting today. Nine sharp. Her hands hadn't stopped being cold since she got out of bed.

　　She hadn't slept. She'd spent the night deciding whether to tell someone about the text and deciding, over and over, that there was no one safe to tell. Kemi would panic. The police would ask questions she didn't have answers to yet. And the one person who might actually know what it meant was a man she'd met for four minutes on a sidewalk last night, a man whose hand on her arm she was still thinking about more than she wanted to admit.

　　A woman at the desk pointed them toward the family room. Soft chairs, too much morning light for how Bianca felt. She picked a seat near the back, close to the door. Old habit. Always know your exit.

　　Then the door at the front opened, and Ethan walked in.

　　Her stomach dropped clean through the floor.

　　He hadn't seen her yet, scanning a folder, sleeves rolled like he'd been up as long as she had. When he looked up his eyes swept the room and landed on her and just stopped.

　　"You," he said, before he could catch it.

　　Every parent in the room turned. Bianca's face went hot.

　　"You two know each other?" a woman near the front asked, light, like it was cute.

　　"We met last night," Ethan said, recovering fast, professional again in one blink. "Briefly."

　　He didn't say how. He didn't say where. Bianca watched him choose not to, and something in her chest loosened, just slightly, the way it had on that street corner right before her phone went off.

　　The meeting ran forty minutes. He talked about the program schedule, the counselors, what to expect from the first few sessions, and Bianca watched him do it, steady and unhurried, like every parent in that room was the only one that mattered to him right now. Halfway through, his eyes found hers over the top of a mother's raised hand, just for a second, just long enough to feel like something private passing between two people in a room full of strangers. She looked down at her lap and made herself stop counting how many times it happened after that.

　　He was good at this, she realized, watching him talk to a room full of scared, tired parents like they were the only thing that mattered in his day. When Zoe raised her hand and asked if the other kids in the program had lost their hair too, he didn't glance at Bianca for permission. He just looked at her daughter and told her the truth.

　　"Some did," he said. "Some are still growing it back. Nobody here is going to stare at you for it."

　　Zoe nodded slowly, like she'd been waiting a long time for someone to say that out loud.

　　Bianca's throat went tight. She hadn't expected to feel this, watching a stranger be kind to her daughter.

　　After the meeting, families filed out one by one. Bianca held back, letting Zoe run ahead to the fish tank in the hallway. She told herself she had a scheduling question.

　　Ethan found her first.

　　"I didn't know," he said quietly, close enough now that she caught the same warmth off him from last night. "Last night, on the street. I had no idea you were part of this program."

　　"I didn't know you ran it."

　　He studied her for a second, something almost amused crossing his face. "Small world."

　　"Very small." She glanced toward Zoe, who was pressing her palm flat against the fish tank glass, then back at him. "You looked different last night. Less…" She searched for the word.

　　"Composed?"

　　"I was going to say human."

　　That earned her a real laugh, short and surprised, like she'd caught him off guard twice in twelve hours. "I'll take that as a compliment."

　　"It was one."

　　He looked at her a beat longer than the conversation needed, the kind of look that made her very aware of how close they were standing in an empty hallway with a fish tank humming behind them and nothing urgent happening for the first time all morning. She felt it land somewhere under her ribs, warm, unwelcome, impossible to ignore. She noticed, stupidly, that he smelled like cedar and coffee, and hated that she noticed at all.

　　"I meant to ask you something last night," he said. "Before your phone went off."

　　"What?"

　　"I don't remember anymore. You laughed and it went straight out of my head."

　　Heat crawled up her neck that had nothing to do with anger this time. She looked away first, down at her hands, anywhere but his face, because looking at his face for one more second felt like standing too close to a fire she didn't have the right to warm herself at yet.

　　Then his expression shifted, the moment folding closed as fast as it had opened.

　　"My assistant called me right after I left you last night," he said, voice dropping back into something careful. "Someone tried to pull a family's file out of the system without authorization." He paused. "Yours."

　　Bianca's whole body went still.

　　"Someone tried to remove Zoe from the program," she said slowly. "Last night."

　　"Yes."

　　"While I was still standing on that sidewalk with you."

　　"Yes." His jaw tightened. "I fixed it before I left."

　　The pieces slammed together so fast it made her dizzy. Stay away from my brother, or your daughter loses her spot. Not a threat about today. A threat about something that had already happened and already been stopped by a man who hadn't even known her name yet when he stopped it.

　　"Why would you do that?" she asked. "You didn't know me."

　　"Because it wasn't right." He said it simply, like decency was just the default setting he ran on. "Whoever did it wasn't authorized to touch that file. Not while I'm running this foundation."

　　She looked at him, really looked, this stranger who'd caught her falling on a sidewalk twelve hours ago and was already standing between her daughter and something Bianca hadn't even known to be afraid of yet.

　　"Ethan." She said his name carefully, testing it like ice before putting her weight on it. "That text last night. It wasn't my sister."

　　His face shifted, warmth folding into focus. "Who was it?"

　　Bianca pulled out her phone, scrolled to the message, turned the screen toward him. Her hand wasn't quite steady.

　　He read it. She watched the exact second his expression changed, confusion sliding into something colder.

　　"Ingrid," he said. Not a question.

　　Bianca's stomach turned over. "You know her."

　　"She's my sister."

　　The word sat between them, heavy and impossible, and Bianca watched twelve hours of something warm and new go very, very quiet on his face.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​