Alle Kapitel von Babysitting The CEO's Daughter : Kapitel 111 – Kapitel 120

I noticed it in the kitchen first.Not her absence exactly. The shape of it. The way the counter had two mugs on the drying rack instead of three, the way the chair at the island that she had claimed without claiming it, without ever saying this is mine, sat at a slightly different angle because no one had pulled it out that morning. Small things. The kind of things you only noticed because some part of you had been tracking them without your permission for longer than you would have chosen.I stood in the kitchen doorway at seven in the morning and looked at the two mugs and understood that she was gone before I had confirmed it with anything else.I went upstairs.Her door was open.I pushed it further and stood in the frame and looked at a room that was tidy in a way it hadn't been when she lived in it, tidy in the specific way of a space that had been returned to neutral, and I looked at the bedside table where the water glass always sat and the chair where she left the book she w

Fletcher's POVI pulled the old files on a Tuesday night.Not because I had decided to. Because I was restless in the specific way that had no clean outlet, the kind of restlessness that came from having too many unresolved things running simultaneously and no productive direction to aim them, and when I was restless like this I worked, because work was the one thing that had never failed to give the restlessness somewhere to go.Except tonight the work kept pulling me sideways.I had the Harrington partnership files open on my desk, the legitimate ones, the ones my legal team had reviewed and approved and that were moving toward signature on a timeline that had nothing to do with the other things I was thinking about, and I kept finding myself three documents deep into a different set of files entirely. The older ones. The ones I had not opened in years because opening them required going somewhere I had decided not to go.The inheritance case.Loise Harrington's inheritance case.I

Fletcher's POVThe alert came through at eight forty-three.I know the exact time because I was looking at my phone when it happened, reading a message from my contact in the city that had come back faster than I expected and contained the beginning of something I wasn't ready to sit with yet, and the tracker notification pushed it off the screen and I looked at the coordinates and felt the floor of everything shift slightly beneath me.The location made no sense.Nicole was supposed to be at her mother's. She had been at her mother's for two weeks and the tracker had been sitting at the same address for two weeks, the address I had looked up once and not acted on because acting on it required me to decide what I was going to do and I had been in the process of deciding and now the coordinates on my screen were not her mother's address and they were not moving.Stationary.I was already standing.I grabbed my jacket and my keys and I was out of the study and down the stairs before I h

Loise's POVNobody told me what happened.That was the first thing, the thing that made me understand it was serious, because when adults didn't tell you things it was never because the things were small. Small things they told you without thinking. Big things they carried past you with their faces arranged carefully and their voices at the specific temperature of people who had decided you were too young for the truth and hadn't yet learned that being too young for the truth was not the same as being unable to feel its shape.I felt its shape.I felt it

Nicole's POVThe first thing was warmth.Not light, not sound, just warmth, the specific quality of it that meant someone was holding my hand, and I knew it was a hand and not a blanket or a pillow because there was a pulse in it, steady and slow, and I held onto that pulse the way you hold onto a sound in the dark when you're not sure where the walls are.I didn't know where the walls were.I didn't know where anything was except the warmth and the pulse and the feeling of being very far down inside myself, deeper than sleep, in the place that sleep doesn't quite reach, where things floated past without attaching to anything and you could almost catch them and then couldn't.I tried to catch them.The city came first.Not an image exactly, more like the feeling of a place before you see it, the particular quality of its air, the way it smelled in the morning when the coffee shops opened and the steam from them mixed with the cold and you could stand on the pavement and breathe it and