Chapter 10 - Dawn in Tribeca
The sun was just beginning to break over the East River when Gabriel returned to the forty-eighth-floor penthouse. He expected the apartment to be dark, cold, and heavy with the ghosts of the past week.
Instead, as he walked down the hallway toward the master suite, he heard something he hadn't heard in four agonizing months.
Laughter.
Real, uninhibited, bubbling child's laughter.
Gabriel pushed the double doors open. Sunlight flooded the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the massive pink bed, Lily was sitting up, her cheeks flushed with healthy color, holding a plastic dinosaur while Claire sat cross-legged beside her, wearing a silly paper crown fashioned from an old envelope.
Lily looked up and saw her father standing in the doorway. For a terrifying second, Gabriel braced himself for her to shrink back into the pillows, to close the door on him once again.
Instead, Lily smiled—a small, bright, beautiful smile—and held up a plastic green T-Rex. "Daddy, look. Claire says the dinosaur eats bad guys."
Gabriel felt a massive, suffocating weight lift from his chest—a weight he had been carrying since the day the bullets shattered his car windows. He swallowed hard, blinking back the hot sting behind his eyelids, and walked slowly toward the bed.
He knelt down, coming face-to-face with his daughter, then looked across the mattress at Claire Donnelly. The girl from Astoria had tears in her eyes, her frayed sweater cuffs bunched around her wrists, looking exhausted, triumphant, and entirely unbreakable.
"Thank you, Claire," Gabriel whispered, his voice thick with a vulnerability he showed to no one else on earth.
May you like
Claire offered a soft, tired smile, adjusting her paper crown. "Just doing my job, Mr. Varrick. But I think your daughter deserves a better nanny... and a much bigger playground."
Gabriel let out a genuine, rumbling laugh—the first one in months. Outside the window, New York City woke up to a new day, but inside the penthouse, the storm had finally passed.
