CHAPTER 3

SERENA

I didn’t think I’d fall asleep. I’d spent all night going over my plans and trying to make sure there weren’t any loopholes. I didn’t know much about Zane… not anymore. And I couldn’t rely on what I knew about him four years ago, when we were still married. I used to think he was the perfect man, but look where that got me. So I knew I had to be extra careful. Zane was a powerful man, and I couldn’t afford to get caught.

The plan was simple; be the best nanny I could be, and get my daughter out of here before Zane would figure out the truth. She’d spent almost five years of her life with Zane, but I wasn’t going to let her grow up with the man who’d tried to kill her mother.

I bolted awake when someone knocked rapidly on my door, my hand closing around the knife I kept under my pillow before the door opened and Zane appeared, looking as blank-faced as always.

“I need to leave for work soon. I need you downstairs in thirty minutes.”

I was nodding and shoving the blanket off me before he even finished talking, only to realize when his eyes went wide as saucers that in my sleepy haze, I’d forgotten that I’d worn booty shorts and a tank top to bed last night.

It was too late to hide myself and I knew it.

“What are all those scars?” Zane asked.

I froze like a deer caught in headlights, and watched something flicker across his face that didn’t belong to me, something like concern. But it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

“I- I uh-” I sputtered, trying to find the right words. “They’re from my accident.”

I’m pretty sure the loud gulp of air I took after that answer could be heard all the way in Australia.

His eyes moved over my arms, my collarbone, and the thin silver line that curved along my ribs. Zane looked like he didn’t believe me, and rightfully so. My entire body was covered in scars from the night I’d been attacked, and the only reason he was just now seeing them was because I’d been dressed in long pants and turtle necks both times that we met before. To be honest, his confusion was irritating. He did this to me. He didn’t have the right to stand there and look at me like that.

“If you’re worried about Lori seeing me like this, I have coverups.” I offered, desperate to move on from the awkwardness.

He shook his head. “No. No, you’re okay. We’ll be waiting downstairs.” He answered abruptly, and before I could say anything, he was gone.

I found myself on my bathroom floor with tears rolling down my cheeks after he left. I hated this body. I hated all the knife scars that covered me, and most of all, I hated Zane Carter.

Twenty minutes later, I made my way down to the kitchen, where Zane was already waiting.

“Lori, come. It’s time to meet Miss Sterling.” He motioned to the little girl sitting behind him with a plate of eggs in front of her.

My heart was pounding so loud that I thought I would faint. I twisted my fingers nervously in front of me before realizing how weird it was and placing my hands by my sides. But still, my heart didn’t stop pounding.

The child appeared from behind him, and oh my god. All the air was knocked out of me the second I saw her face. It took an awful lot of willpower to rapidly blink back the tears that were threatening to spill before Zane would notice.

“Good morning, Miss Sterling.” She greeted, holding on to her father’s leg as she shyly looked up at me.

Lori Carter was a spitting image of me as a little girl. Her heart shaped face and deep brown - almost black eyes were the same color as mine, and her hair… She had the most gorgeous blond curls I’d ever seen. It was like looking in a mirror.

“…Serena?”

Zane’s voice brought me back to the present, and I realized I’d just been staring at the little girl without saying a word. I shook my head and tried to stay focused, earning a suspicious look from Zane. “Sorry, I- she’s beautiful”

“She knows it.” He picked her up and set her down on a stool and slid a bowl of strawberry ice cream in front of her, and the way he did it like it was something he did every morning told me everything his silence in the car yesterday hadn’t. I’d only seen them together for a couple minutes, but it was obvious that the stoic Zane Carter I’d come to know was nothing but sunshine when it came to his daughter. He crouched to her eye level. “Eat two more spoons before Pete gets here, or no comic books in the car.”

“Three,” Lori bargained.

“Two.”

“Two and a half.”

He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Fine. Menace.”

She beamed at him like he’d handed her the sun.

I stood there frozen, watching a man I’d spent four years hating be soft with my child, and something in my chest cracked right down the center. This wasn’t the cold, absent father I’d pictured in my head to make the last four years make sense. This was tenderness… Real tenderness. And I didn’t know what to do with the fact that both things — the monster and this version of Zane — were supposed to live in the same man.

I took a step closer to her. “Hi Lori, I’m Serena. I’m going to be your new nanny.”

Those were the words that came out of my mouth. But my heart was screaming ‘My girl! My girl! My babygirl!’

She smiled sweetly as she ate another spoonful of ice cream. She’d definitely eaten more than the three spoonfuls she’d asked for, but Zane wasn’t paying attention… or maybe he was just letting her have her way.

“You have a funny voice,” she said.

“It’s called an accent.” Zane’s mouth twitched. “Be nice.”

“I am being nice. I like it.” Lori tilted her head at me and her big eyes went serious. “Are you going to leave like the other ones?”

My heart broke at that question. The kitchen went very still, Zane’s jaw tightened, and for a moment, the warmth from a second ago packed itself away behind something guarded.

“Lori.” It was a quiet warning.

“It's okay, it’s a fair question.” I got even closer so we were looking face to face at each other, the way I’d promised myself I would if this moment ever came. “I’m not going anywhere, Lori. I’m going to be here for a long time. I promise.”

She studied me the way five-year-olds do when they’re deciding whether an adult is lying — long and unblinking. “Okay,” she said finally, like she’d made a ruling. “You can stay.”

Zane exhaled, and I caught the small, unguarded relief on his face before he smoothed it away. He bent, pressed one more kiss to Lori’s curls, and murmured something against her hair I didn’t catch. She giggled an actual, unrestrained giggle, nothing like the composed little robot I’d braced myself for when I imagined what kind of child she’d be.

He straightened, checked his watch, and the wall went back up piece by piece as he looked at me. “Pete will take you to drop-off. I have a call in eleven minutes.”

“Of course.”

He paused at the door, and for a second I thought he might say something else. Instead his eyes dropped briefly, just enough that I noticed, to the sliver of my wrist where a scar peeked out from my sleeve. Then he was gone.

“You’re pretty,” Lori announced when we were alone, swinging her legs against the stool. “You look like someone.”

My pulse stuttered. Did she recognize me? She was only one when I.. did she remember me? “Really? Who’s that?”

She shrugged, already losing interest, reaching for her cup of water. “I don’t know. Just someone.”

I smiled and said nothing, but underneath the table, my hands were shaking.

••••••••••

“Do you want to hear about the Guardian?” Lori asked when we got in the car, digging a battered comic book out of her backpack. The cover was soft at the corners, like it had been read a hundred times.

I sat beside her booster seat, hyperaware of every inch of space between us, still rattled from what she’d said in the kitchen.

“The Guardian?”

“He’s a superhero. He used to be bad, but now he’s good, but everyone still thinks he’s bad, so he has to prove it.” She explained like it was the most interesting thing in the world. “Daddy reads it to me before bed. But only Tuesdays and Thursdays because of his calls.”

Something about that specific detail — only Tuesdays and Thursdays — sat heavy in my chest. “Can I see?”

She handed it over carefully. I turned it over in my hands, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor of the car as a memory hit me.

Nightshade Comics. Issue 14.

I used to collect these long ago, in what now feels like another life, in an apartment with too many boxes and not enough shelves. I'd had this exact issue tucked into a milk crate under my bed.

“I know this one,” I said, before I could stop myself, not sure where the memory had come from.

Lori’s head snapped toward me so fast her curls bounced. “You know the Guardian?”

“I used to have the whole collection. Issues one through twenty, I think, maybe even higher.” My voice came out thinner than I wanted it to. “I loved comics.”

“What’s your favorite one?”

“Honestly?” I flipped through a few pages, old panels swimming up out of somewhere I thought the brain trauma had taken from me. “The one where everyone finds out he saved the city and still doesn’t trust him. And he doesn’t even get mad. He just keeps doing it anyway.”

Lori went very quiet, staring at me with an intensity five-year-olds shouldn’t be capable of. “That’s my favorite too,” she said, like I’d passed a test. “Daddy says that’s a dumb reason to like a superhero. He says the Guardian should get mad. He says it’s not fair.”

“Maybe your dad’s a little bit right.” I handed the comic back carefully. “But maybe the Guardian knows something your dad doesn’t. That sometimes doing the right thing is worth it even when nobody claps for you.”

She considered this with the same unblinking seriousness she’d studied me with in the kitchen. Then, unprompted, she scooted six inches across the seat until her shoulder pressed against my arm, and went back to flipping pages like it was nothing. Like she did this with everyone.

What she didn’t know was that this simple act meant everything to me.

We rode like that for a few minutes, her small finger tracing the comic book, occasionally holding one up for my opinion, before she spoke again without looking up.

“What happened to your arms?”

I froze. Pete’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and away again, and I understood, in that moment, that this was a car with no secrets in it — everything got reported somewhere.

“I got hurt a long time ago,” I said carefully.

She looked at me with wide eyes. “Did somebody hurt you?”

I looked up at the rear view mirror uncomfortably. Pete wasn’t looking at us anymore, but I knew he was listening.

“Yes,” I cleared my throat. “A bad man hurt me.”

“A bad man? Like Mr Dubby in the Guardian?”

I smiled. “Yes, like Mr Dubby.”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sad about it?”

Nobody had ever asked me that so plainly. Not my only friend Betty, not the therapist I’d stopped seeing after the second year, not even myself. I’d only ever let it be anger, because anger was easier to carry than grief. “Sometimes,” I admitted. “But I try not to let it be the only thing about me.”

Lori nodded slowly, like she was filing this away for later, and then, with the terrifying, casual precision only children have, she reached over and laid two fingers against the thin scar on my forearm, the way you’d touch something to make sure it was real.

“I think you’re brave,” she said. “Like the Guardian.”

My throat closed up so fast I couldn’t answer for a second. I looked down at her — my daughter, five years old, comforting a virtual stranger with a superhero comparison. She was so much like me it physically hurt, and I had to look out the window to keep from falling apart in the back of a car with a driver who would most likely report everything back to Zane.

“Thank you, Lori,” I finally managed.

“You’re welcome.” She’d already gone back to the comic, entirely unaware she’d just cracked something open in me that I didn’t know how to close again. “Next time I’ll bring issue fifteen. It’s the best one. Daddy won’t let me bring the whole box in the car, he says I’ll lose them.”

“I’d like that,” I said, and meant it more than she could possibly know.

Pete pulled up outside the school gates a few minutes later, and Lori gathered her things, sliding the comic back into her bag like it was made of glass. I got out and unbuckled her, and before she walked away, she looked up at me with her hand on the door handle.

“Serena?”

“Yes?”

“You’re my favorite nanny already. Thank you for coming to live with us” She said it so innocently, and then she was gone, backpack bouncing, disappearing through the gates without looking back.

I sat there in the quiet after the door shut, comic-book panels and small careful fingers still burning somewhere behind my ribs, and the realization that if I wasn’t careful, this plan of mine was going to break my heart long before it ever fixed anything.