Nathaniel could not answer.
He was watching the way Oliver’s body melted into her. The way Grace’s hand moved automatically to the back of his head, careful, practiced, familiar. The way she rocked once without thinking, exactly as if she had done it a hundred times in the dark.
Not like a maid holding the child of her employer.
Like someone who knew the weight of him half-asleep.
Madeline stood first, smoothing her gown with hands that were not quite steady.
“Well,” she said, trying to laugh and failing. “Babies do love the staff, don’t they?”
The sentence landed gently on the surface and ugly underneath.
Grace lowered her eyes.
Nathaniel turned slowly toward Madeline.
“She has a name.”
Madeline’s smile flickered. “Of course. I didn’t mean—”
“Grace,” Nathaniel said.
The room tightened around the word.
Grace looked up again, startled that he had used it in front of everyone.
Oliver patted her cheek with one small hand.
Nathaniel walked toward them and crouched, not above Grace, not beside her, but in front of his son.
“Hey, Ollie,” he whispered.
Oliver looked at him, then leaned back into Grace, still clinging.
Nathaniel felt something inside him break.
Not the way grief had broken him. This was different. Cleaner. Sharper.
A truth he should have seen months ago.
“How often does he come to you?” Nathaniel asked quietly.
Grace swallowed. “Sir?”
“When he’s upset. How often?”
She looked toward the other staff near the doorway, then back at him.
“I don’t keep count.”
“Grace.”
Her voice dropped. “Most nights, for a while.”
Nathaniel went still.
“Most nights?”
“When Mrs. Bellamy was still here, she didn’t like night duty. Oliver would wake up crying, and sometimes no one heard him right away.” Grace’s cheeks flushed. “So I started listening for him.”
The old nanny, Mrs. Bellamy, had left three weeks earlier.
Nathaniel remembered signing the final check.
He remembered thinking she had seemed professional.
He had not known his son had been crying through nights while he sat in the library answering emails from Singapore.
“And you didn’t tell me?” he asked.
Grace’s eyes filled with embarrassment, not accusation.
“You had just lost your wife,” she said. “Everyone said not to trouble you.”
Nathaniel looked down.
