THE MAFIA BOSS FIRED EVERY NANNY—UNTIL ONE WOMAN MADE HIS TWINS LAUGH AND EXPOSED THE SECRET THAT KILLED HIS WIFE

"Do it again," I said.

Elise blinked. The yellow gloves hung from her fingertips, and the nursery was so quiet I could hear the little motor in the white-noise machine turning beside the rocking chair.

"Sir?"

"The duck," I said, feeling ridiculous. "Whatever you were doing. Do it again."

She searched my face, probably looking for the joke. Men in my position were not famous for their sense of humor. Particularly not at two in the morning, when they appeared in doorways wearing a black T-shirt and an expression that had made grown men reconsider their lives.

But Elise slipped a glove back over her hand. She opened and closed its fingers as if the yellow rubber had a mouth.

"I demand a meeting with the manager," she said in a squeaky voice.

The other glove answered in a gravelly growl. "The manager is a potato."

Maisie made a delighted hiccuping sound. Rosie followed with a laugh so sudden that Elise laughed too. Something in my chest shifted. Not healed. Nothing so generous. Just moved enough to let air through.

"They were crying because of a storm," Elise explained quietly. "The thunder woke them. I tried rocking them and singing. Then I remembered this ridiculous thing my aunt used to do when I was little. I wasn't trying to keep them awake."

"I know."

Two words. They cost me more than threatening a rival ever had.

Rosie stretched both hands toward me. Or perhaps toward the shadow I made against the lamp. Since Serena died, I had stopped trusting my ability to distinguish one from the other.

"She wants you," Elise said.

"She wants you."

"Mr. Caruso, she's looking right at you."

I approached the crib as though the floor were wired with explosives. For months I had been able to order armored cars, question men who lied for a living, and hold meetings where everyone at the table feared making eye contact. Yet this little girl with her mother's dark eyelashes could turn me into a coward.

"I don't know what to do," I admitted.

Elise's face softened, but she didn't rush to reassure me. "Put one hand under her head. The other beneath her back. Lift slowly. You don't have to make her stop crying. You just have to be there."

Rosie felt almost weightless in my arms. Her warm cheek brushed my collarbone. She studied me, solemn for a beat, and then seized a fistful of my shirt as if she had decided I might be worth keeping.

My breath caught.

I remembered Serena in the hospital, exhausted and laughing through tears, insisting that Rosie had my stubborn mouth and Maisie had inherited both our tempers. I remembered promising that our daughters would never feel alone. Three months later, I'd been standing beside a coffin, and the promise had turned into something I couldn't bear to examine.

"Hi, sweetheart," I whispered.

Rosie made a soft, contented noise.

I looked at Elise. She had turned away, giving me privacy without leaving the room.

"You can call me Luca," I said.

Her shoulders went still. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"It's my name."

"It's also the name of the man who signs my paychecks."

I almost smiled. "You always argue?"

"Only when I'm terrified."

She said it plainly. That startled me more than any show of courage would have. I wanted to ask whether she was terrified of me or of being dismissed. Instead, I looked down at my daughter.

"I'm sorry I came in angry."

"You didn't know what you were walking into."

"I thought you were failing them."

"And now?"

The question was reasonable. It was also dangerous. For a moment I imagined telling her the truth: that she'd made me feel jealous, ashamed, relieved, and grateful in the space of a single heartbeat. That my daughters had welcomed her into a room where I had been afraid to enter.

"Now I think they're lucky you stayed."

Elise lowered her eyes. A faint flush climbed her cheeks.

Maisie began fussing, affronted at being left out. Elise picked her up and settled into the rocking chair while I sat on the edge of the rug, Rosie asleep against my shoulder. Rain ticked against the glass. Beyond the nursery windows, the grounds of my estate lay under security lights and dark trees. It was an odd little picture: the most feared man in our corner of Chicago sitting barefoot on a floor beside a woman in yellow gloves.

"Tell me something," I said. "Why did you take this job? The agency must have warned you."

"They told me the girls were difficult."

"They are not difficult."

"No," she agreed. "They're grieving in the only way they know how."

I stared at her. People offered me sympathy like a glass I was supposed to drink and hand back. Nobody had ever put the girls' pain so simply.

"You have experience with that?" I asked.

Her expression changed. "With grief? Yes."

She looked away before I could ask more.

I had the sudden, uncomfortable impression that there were locked rooms inside Elise Navarro that she guarded as fiercely as I guarded this house.

In the meantime, Elise taught me how to recognize the different cries. There was the impatient cry, the hungry cry, and the indignant protest that arose whenever someone had the nerve to change a diaper. I had assumed all crying meant unhappiness. She explained that a baby could be tired, overstimulated, uncomfortable, or simply in need of a familiar face. It embarrassed me that she knew my daughters better after two weeks than I had managed to know them in four months.

"You can learn," she said when I admitted as much.

"What if I'm late?"

"For what?"

"For becoming their father."

She looked at the sleeping baby in my arms. "They don't know the man you think you were supposed to be yesterday. They know who's holding them tonight."

I had built my reputation on promises that came with deadlines. That promise had no date on it. It had to be made again each time one of them cried. A strange peace came from realizing I wasn't being asked to solve a lifetime at once.

When Rosie finally drifted off, I did not give her back immediately. I sat listening to the rain, counting the small, steady breaths against my chest, and trying to remember what it felt like to be allowed to be ordinary.

At three-thirty, Maisie finally slept. Elise eased her into the crib and quietly checked the monitor. I stayed where I was, reluctant to disturb a peace that felt borrowed.

"You should rest," she murmured.

"So should you."

"I'm off at seven."

"I'll arrange for someone to cover you in the morning."

She shook her head. "A new face might upset them. I can nap when they do."

"Elise, you don't have to earn your place here by exhausting yourself."

For a second she looked as if I had spoken in a language she hadn't heard in years.

"Neither do you," she replied.

I watched the rain beyond the windows. I wanted to tell her no one had ever said that to me. Instead, I carefully lowered Rosie into her crib. Her fingers held my shirt until the last possible second.

When I turned, Elise was slipping the gloves into a drawer. A thin silver chain slid out from the neckline of her sweater. At its end hung a small key, old-fashioned, no bigger than my thumbnail.

Something about it troubled me. Serena had worn a similar one on a chain after the twins were born. I had assumed it opened a jewelry box and never asked.

Elise noticed my stare and tucked the key away.

"A family keepsake," she said before I could speak.

I nodded, but the word family had begun to ring differently in that room.

At the door I stopped. "The glove show. If it works again, don't worry about what anyone thinks."

Her mouth curved. "Even if the head of the Caruso family catches me arguing with potatoes?"

"Especially then."

I left her with the sleeping girls and walked back through the mansion. For the first time in months, the hallways didn't seem entirely empty.

At the top of the stairs, my phone vibrated. Nico Moretti, my head of security and oldest friend, had sent a photograph from the north gate. A black sedan had lingered outside the property for eleven minutes and driven away when challenged.

No plate. Tinted windows. Familiar tactics.

Under the image was a message.