บททั้งหมดของ Babysitting The CEO's Daughter : บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

Nicole's POVHe wasn't supposed to be back until tomorrow.That was the first thing I thought when the gate alert came through on Mr. Akim's radio at nine pm — not Xavier's home, not something's wrong, just the flat administrative observation that the timeline had changed and nobody had told me.The second thing I thought was that I should go upstairs.The third thing, which arrived before I could act on the second, was the sound of the front door.He looked like Germany had not been kind to him. The suit was good — it was always a good suit — but he was wearing it at the end of a long day at the end of a long week and it showed in the shoulders, the slightly loosened tie, the particular quality of tiredness that comes from too many hours in too many rooms making too many decisions. He had his bag over one shoulder and his phone in his hand and he stopped just inside the door and his eyes moved across the room.They found me before they found anything else.Not the hallway, not the sta

Loise's POVThey kept trying to take me home.First it was Mr. Akim, who crouched down to my level in the hospital corridor and used his careful voice, the one he saved for things he thought might upset me, and said that it was very late and my bed was at home and Miss Nicole was being looked after by the doctors. Then it was a nurse who smelled like antiseptic and had kind eyes and offered me a juice box, which I took because I was thirsty, but I did not go anywhere. Then it was daddy, who looked at me over the nurse's head with the face he made when he was too tired to argue and knew he was going to lose anyway.I stayed.Nobody tried a fourth time.The chair next to Nicole's bed was too big for me, the way all hospital chairs were too big, so I sat with my legs dangling and Rabbit on my lap and watched the machines do their work. They beeped at regular intervals. A green line moved across a screen. These things meant she was alive, which I already knew because I could see her chest

Xavier's POVThe sealed records took four hours and three phone calls to people who owed me things I had never collected on until now.The administrator who finally authorized access did it with the resigned professionalism of someone who had recognized that the wall between her and the request was not going to hold and had decided to move rather than be moved. She sent the files to a secure server. She asked me not to tell anyone how I got them. I told her I wouldn't and meant it.Then I sat in a rented office space forty minutes from the university and read through seven years of someone else's worst time.She had been admitted in October of her third year.The intake notes described a twenty-one year old presenting with severe dissociative episodes, memory fragmentation, and significant emotional dysregulation. The language was clinical and careful, the kind of language medical professionals use when they are trying to describe something serious without letting the seriousness becom

Nicole's POVThe first thing I was properly aware of was weight — the specific heaviness of a body that had been horizontal for too long, that dull deep ache that starts in the shoulders and works its way down and doesn't respond well to shifting position. The second thing was light, more of it than I wanted. The third thing was Xavier, standing at the foot of the bed.He looked terrible.That was my first coherent thought and it arrived with the clarity of something obvious — his shirt was creased in the way shirts got when they'd been slept in, his tie was gone, and his face had the particular quality of someone who had been awake for longer than was sensible and was running on something grimmer than coffee. But it was his expression that stopped me. I had seen Xavier controlled, and Xavier strategic, and Xavier performing whatever version of himself the room required, and I had seen him undone in the corridor of a children's hospital when he thought his daughter might not be alright

Nicole's POVMy heart felt like it was shattering into a thousand pieces as I sat in my room, watching the shadows lengthen across the floor as evening approached. Tomorrow, Xavier would return from his business trip, and tonight would be my last night in this house that had become more of a home than anywhere I'd ever lived.I couldn't stop my mind from wandering through all the memories Loise and I had created together. The afternoon we'd spent making "daggers" out of cardboard and foil, staging elaborate battles between knights and princesses in the garden. She'd insisted that the princess should have the biggest sword, declaring with six-year-old authority that "girls can fight dragons too, you know."I remembered the way she'd giggle when I'd chase her around the rose bushes, both of us wielding our makeshift weapons and shouting battle cries that probably had the neighbors thinking we'd lost our minds. Those moments had been pure magic—the kind of carefree joy that adults forge