All Chapters of Babysitting The CEO's Daughter : Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Nicole's POVThe first thing was light.Not the dream light, not the flat hospital white from the fragments, but real light, the kind that had direction and warmth and came from a specific source, and it pressed against my closed eyelids with the gentle insistence of something that had been waiting and was done waiting.The second thing was the hand.Still there.Still holding mine with the same steady grip that had been the one constant through all of it, the pulse I had followed like a rope through the dark, and I knew before I opened my eyes that I didn't want to move too fast because moving too fast might disturb the hand and I wasn't ready to lose the hand yet.I opened my eyes.The ceiling was the first thing I saw, white and flat and familiar in the way of hospital ceilings everywhere, and I lay there for a moment and let it be the ceiling and let myself be horizontal underneath it and took stock of things slowly, the way you took stock after something that had used everything

Nicole's POV I had been awake for three hours when Fletcher came back.I heard him before I saw him, the particular quality of his footsteps in the corridor, the ones I had learned to distinguish from every other set of footsteps in that house without realising I was learning them. Loise heard them too. Her pencil slowed and she looked at the door with the expression she used when she was preparing herself for something she had already decided how to handle.The door opened.He stood in the frame and he looked at me and something happened in his face that he didn't manage in time, something that moved through it fast and unguarded before the composure came back and settled, and I lay against the pillow and looked at him and felt the weight of however many days had passed between the service alley and this moment sitting in the air between us.He looked tired.Not the normal tired, not the tired of a man who had stayed at the office too long and come home after dinner again. The tired

I had rehearsed it on the flight back.Not the words exactly, but the order of them, the sequence that would make the most sense, that would give her each piece in the right arrangement so that by the time she had all of it the shape would be clear rather than overwhelming. I had sat in a seat at thirty thousand feet with the folder on my knee and I had thought about her face and I had planned the conversation the way I planned everything that mattered, carefully, with full attention to the variables.None of the planning survived contact with her eyes.She was looking at me from the hospital bed with her hand tightening on Loise's and her face doing something I had never seen it do, not in the office and not in the house and not in any of the moments between us that I had been cataloguing without permission for months. It was the face of someone standing at the edge of something enormous and looking down and trying to decide whether the falling had already started or whether there wa

Nicole's POVFletcher left at some point after midnight.Not far — he told me he would be in the corridor and I believed him because believing him felt, for the first time, like something I had earned the right to do rather than something I was choosing against my better judgment. Loise had fallen asleep again properly, both feet tucked under her in the chair and the drawing pad closed on her lap, and the room had settled into the low quiet of a hospital at the deep end of the night.I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about everything.I had been doing this for two hours.The thinking kept arriving in pieces rather than as a whole, fragments assembling and reassembling without settling into the complete picture, because the complete picture was too large to hold all at once and my head was still hurting and some part of me understood that trying to hold all of it tonight was not something I was going to be able to do without losing the edges of it.So I held the p

Nicole's POVLoise came in first.She climbed onto the edge of the bed without asking, which she had stopped asking permission for somewhere around day two of the hospital stay, and she opened her drawing pad to the page she had been keeping face-down for three days and held it out to me with both hands.I looked at it.The kitchen. Our kitchen, the morning one, the counter and the window with the garden behind it and the light coming in at the angle it came in at before seven when the day was still deciding what it wanted to be. She had drawn Fletcher at the counter with his coffee and his phone, and she had drawn me at the stove with my back sligh