Chapter 15
Nicole’s POV
I made it to the library in four minutes and forty seconds. I know because I counted them, the way I counted everything when panic was trying to get the upper hand.
I did not forget my mask. Even in those four minutes, even with my heart doing something unpleasant in my chest, I stopped at the corridor cabinet where I kept a spare and put it on, because years of careful living had made certain things automatic. The twins being lost was terrifying. The twins being found by the wrong person would
be worse.
I was almost at the entrance when I saw them.
Tate, and Jonathan just behind him, coming out through the library doors with the purposeful stride of men who had somewhere to be. Close-close enough that if I had arrived thirty seconds earlier I would have walked directly into him.
My feet made the decision before my mind caught up. Keep moving. Don’t slow down, don’t change direction, don’t give his peripheral vision anything to lock onto. I walked straight, mask on, head forward, and we passed each other in the space between the doors – his arm close enough that my hair swept across it – and then he was behind me and I was inside and I did not stop walking until I reached the service desk.
The nanny was already there, pink-faced and apologetic. And there were my children – Rosy sitting composed and straight-backed on the bench with a book open in her lap, Maple beside her with his arms crossed and the particular expression he wore when he was pretending he hadn’t been worried.
“Mummy.” Rosy closed her book immediately, sliding off the bench, and the relief in her voice unknotted something in my chest.
I crouched and pulled them both in, one arm around each of them, and held on for a moment longer than strictly necessary. Maple let me, which told me more than his expression had.
“You’re okay,” I said, mostly to myself.
“We’re okay,” Rosy confirmed, patting my shoulder with the grave tenderness she sometimes produced in moments that called for it.
I pulled back and looked at them. “What happened?”
Maple answered first, because he always did. “Rosy wanted the Pack histories. The old ones. The nanny didn’t know which section and Rosy did, so we went ahead, and then” He paused. “We couldn’t find her after.”
“We went to the service desk,” Rosy added. “Like you taught us.”
“You did exactly right,” I said, and I meant it, the pride and the fear sitting together the way they always did with these two. At three years old, Rosy had already read her way through most of the institute’s children’s section and had apparently moved on to pack historiography. Maple had marched his sister to the service desk and stood guard until help arrived. I had changed three nannies in years because neither of my children operated within normal parameters and most caregivers had not been prepared for that.
I looked at them both for a moment. Maple was doing the thing where he held his chin up slightly higher than usual, which meant he was feeling something he didn’t want to show. Rosy had her hands folded in her lap and was watching my face with the careful attention she always gave to things that mattered to her.
“We’re sorry,” Rosy said quietly. “We made you worry.”
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“We didn’t mean to,” Maple added, and his voice came out smaller than he intended. He cleared his throat. “We stayed together the whole time though.”
“I know,” I said. “I know you did.”
“And we went to the desk,” Rosy said. “Like you always say.”
“You did exactly right,” I said again. “Both of you.”
Maple’s chin came down slightly. “You’re not angry?”
“I’m not angry.” I looked at him steadily. “I was a bit scared.”
He thought about that for a moment. Then he leaned forward and put both arms around my neck without saying anything, which was the most honest thing Maple ever did, and I held him and felt the last of the panic finally leave my chest.
Rosy patted my arm. “We won’t go ahead without the nanny again,” she said.
“Thank you,”
I pulled back and looked at them both, these two people who were three years old and already more than I knew how to prepare for.
The nanny was still apologizing quietly behind me. I told her it was alright, because it was, because my children were sitting in front of me whole and unharmed and that was the only thing that mattered.
Rosy had been quiet from the time she was a baby, barely cried, and by three she could read almost anything she got her hands on.
Today that meant pack histories. Maple was different – just as sharp but bold in a way that had no off switch.
At three he would go anywhere, try anything, challenge anyone. Together they were a combination that had worn out three nannies in two years. Without Marlon and Amber I didn’t know how I would have managed them on my own. I was grateful every day that I didn’t have to find out.
“The man helped us,” Maple said then, “The one with the dark hair, he took us to the desk.”
Something went still in me. “What man?”
“Tall,” Rosy said thoughtfully. “He had an institute pass that Maple checked.”
“I checked,” Maple confirmed, with dignity.
“He had very brown eyes,” Rosy added. “He gave us a smile, but it seems like he doesn’t know how to smile”
I sat with that for a moment – Tate, attempting a smile, taking my children to the service desk and staying until help came.
Tate, who had walked out those doors seconds before I walked in, who had passed close enough to brush my hair without knowing who I was or what I had been running toward.
My children had looked into their father’s face and he had looked into theirs, and none of them had known what they were seeing.
I didn’t understand it, I had been so careful. Years of carefulness all designed to keep this exact thing from happening
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And still, somehow, in a library on an ordinary afternoon, fate had put the three of them in the same room and left me to learn about it secondhand from a three-year-old’s description of his eyes.
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” Maple said, processing aloud. “Probably.”
“No,” I said quietly. “Probably not.”
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