You'll nap. She almost smiled. Are you managing me, Nathan Walker? Somebody's got to, he said. You clearly haven't let anybody try in years.
They drove back to Queens. Lily fell asleep in her car seat within four blocks, the way kids do, dropping into unconsciousness mid-sentence. And the truck went quiet and Victoria watched the burrow slide by and finally said the thing that had been sitting on her chest. "He's going to come after you harder now," she said. "You understand that? " The suspension was him testing the water, seeing if he could still reach into my company and pull a lever.
When he finds out I'm turning the whole machine against him, he's going to stop being subtle. And the easiest target he has isn't me. It's you. A single father, a maintenance salary, no lawyers, no board, no leverage. She turned to look at him.
I did this to you. I let a man into my life who does this, and now he's aiming at you, and you have a little girl asleep in the back seat. Victoria, Nathan kept his eyes on the road. Stop apologizing for what he does. That's his to carry, not yours.
A pause. But I'll be straight with you because you're being straight with me. Yeah, I'm scared. Not for me. I can lose a job.
I've lost jobs. I'll find another. He glanced in the mirror at his sleeping daughter. But if he does something that touches her, if this gets ugly and it splashes on her, if there's ever a day she comes home from school crying because some kid said something because Adrien Cole decided to plant a story. That's the one thing I can't take.
That's my whole line. Everything else I'll write out, not that. Then that's where we hold the line. Victoria said right there. He doesn't get within a mile of her.
I'll build a wall around that child so high and so legal that Adrien Cole couldn't get a rumor through it with a battering ram. She said it with such flat total certainty that Nathan believed her. You gave me your couch, Nathan. I'll give you the one thing I actually know how to do. I'll make you untouchable.
They pulled up outside the apartment. Nathan carried Lily up, still asleep, and laid her down in her room and pulled the blanket over her and stood in the doorway a second the way he did every night. And when he came back out, Victoria was standing in his living room looking at the drawings on the refrigerator again, like she couldn't stop. "I keep coming back to this," she said, not turning around. "This refrigerator, I've closed acquisitions worth more than some country's GDP, and I stand in a two-bedroom in Queens, and I can't stop looking at a child's crayon drawings on a refrigerator, and I want to cry, and I don't fully understand why. " I think you do understand why," Nathan said quietly.