Chapter 5
Damon knelt beside me again, brushing a smear of mud from my sleeve with more gentleness than I had felt from another person in longer than I could remember. "I should have come to you sooner," he said quietly. "I told myself I was protecting you by staying in the shadows. I see now that just left you exposed to people who never deserved to be anywhere near you."
"You didn't know she'd find out today," I said.
"No," he agreed. "But I promised myself the day I learned about our son that I would never again let you face people like her alone. I was late. I won't be late again."
I looked down at the crushed daisies, the muddy grave, the silver bracelet now safe in my palm where he'd placed it. "What happens now?"
May you like
"Now," Damon said, helping me to my feet and keeping one steady arm around me, "you never spend another day scrubbing someone else's floors. You come home, Nora. My home. Our son's home." He looked toward my mother's headstone, quiet in the fog. "And I make sure everyone in this city understands exactly whose family you and our child belong to."
Three months later, I gave birth to a son with Damon's dark eyes and my mother's stubborn chin, in a private hospital wing Damon had personally arranged, surrounded by people who had waited for me instead of past me. Senator Caldwell announced his early retirement from public life that same spring, citing family reasons that everyone in Boston quietly understood. Vanessa Caldwell never came near me again. She didn't have to. She'd learned, in one gray morning in a cemetery, exactly what it cost to raise a hand against something Damon Cross had already decided belonged to him.
