She freezes, and for a moment, her joy falters. I see it, clear as day. That flicker of panic in her eyes, the ghost of what nearly happened the last time we spoke of going away. Her head fills up with thoughts about that doomed trip to Scotland, and her breaths turn shaky.
I step closer, gently cupping her cheek.
“This isn’t for business,” I murmur. “It’s pleasure. No meetings. No deals. Just sun, sea, and far too much food. You, me, the littlies.”
Her eyes well, but this time it’s with relief. “Really?” she whispers.
“Really,” I say. “Just the family. On Holiday toGreece.”
She throws her arms around me again, burying her face in my neck. “Declan, this is amazing! I’ve always wanted to go!”
“And you deserve it. We’ll celebrate you finishing your manuscript,” I say, holding her tighter. “Hell, and summer. We’ll celebrate that too while we’re at it. Any excuse to do fuck all for two weeks.”
She laughs as we come together again for a kiss.
It’s the perfect way to kick off the summer, after what turned out to be a bloody grim spring. The past few weeks have been spent patching ourselves back together and quietly getting on with our life, while the police did their digging and the village gossips had their field day. The ordeal didn’t just end the nightChelsea finally went down—it left its scars we’re doing our best to heal from even now.
This family holiday is part of that. It’s the start of a new season.
Chapter 20
Amerie
Three years later…
Three years later, I still carry pieces of that spring with me, but they don’t own me anymore.
For a long time, I let the guilt fester. I replayed everything that happened in Rosethorne until the memories kept me up at night. They were bruises that refused to fade. I blamed myself, asking why I hadn’t seen the signs sooner, wondering how I could’ve trusted her in the first place, or thinking that maybe if I hadn’t been so tired and distracted maybe I wouldn’t have ever hired her.
But time has a way of putting things into perspective. The more it passes, the greater the distance between the bad thing that happened and the person you grow to be in the present. I came to realize that I didn’t need to blame myself anymore.
That there was nothing I could do to stop what happened.
Chelsea—Claire Hughes—had made up her mind that she was obsessed with me and my family, and one way or another, she was going to act on it.
She made that decision years before I ever met her that afternoon, interviewing her for the nanny position. She simply needed the in to do so.
I gave her one without ever meaning to.
I used to think strength meant pretending nothing hurt. That if I just smiled through it, powered through things like my diabetes struggles, kept the mask in place, then I was doing okay.
Now I know better. Real strength is messier than that. It’s falling apart and still choosing to show up. It’s holding your baby with one arm in a hospital bed and promising you’ll never leave them again, even when your body is trembling and your voice is raw. It’s trusting that the people you love can see the worst of you and still love you anyway.
I don’t need to be perfect. I don’t even want to be anymore. I’ve learned to embrace all of it—the flaws, the imperfections, the losses. I am all of those things and more, and I’ve never been prouder to be.
After everything that happened, Declan and I both knew staying in Rosethorne wasn’t an option. The village had become too small and we’d already outgrown it. We needed something new. Somewhere we could really call home and make fresh memories.
So we packed up our life and moved back to the States.
Virginia felt like the right kind of beginning. I had family here—on my father’s side, distant but we reconnected—and there was something about the stillness of the Blue Ridge Mountains that made us both exhale for the first time in what felt like years.
The house we chose sits beyond a sleepy stretch of road, the kind where deer wander across at dusk and fireflies buzz like sparks in the tall grass in the summer. It’s surrounded by trees that glow gold in the fall, and a porch that wraps around the perimeter. We walked through the front door and knew at once.
This was it. This was home.
Declan finally left the soul-sucking corporate grind behind too, quitting his Managing Director job at Halberd. No more late trains or power-hungry men demanding he sacrifice his personal and family life.
Instead, he went into business for himself, utilizing some of his savvy skillset.
