CHAPTER 2: THE NAME NO ONE SAID OUT LOUD
Valerie hadn’t realized she was still holding the girls’ hands until one of them squeezed harder.
Vanessa looked up at her like she was afraid the world might change its mind and take Valerie away.
Ashley, meanwhile, kept staring at Franklin Buchanan as if waiting for him to correct reality.
Franklin finally moved.
Not toward Valerie—but toward his daughters.
He knelt, expensive suit folding sharply against the marble steps, and brushed a trembling hand over both girls’ hair.
“You were supposed to stay with security,” he said quietly.
“We did,” Ashley insisted. “Until the pigeon.”
Franklin closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. “Of course it was a pigeon.”
Only then did he look at Valerie properly.
Up close, he looked less like a billionaire and more like a man who had not slept in a long time. There was something fractured in his expression—like a glass wall pressed too long against pressure.
“Miss Monroe,” he said.
Valerie blinked. “You know my name?”
His gaze flicked to her ID badge still clipped to her uniform.
“Of course,” he said. “You work in my building.”
That sentence should have ended everything.
It didn’t.
Because Vanessa suddenly stepped closer to Valerie again.
“She smells like home,” the girl whispered.
Franklin went still.
Valerie felt her stomach tighten. “I don’t… I don’t know what she means.”
Franklin stood slowly. “Neither do I.”
Behind them, a black SUV rolled to the curb. Two security men stepped out, earpieces glinting, scanning everything like the air itself was a threat.
One of them spoke into his mic. “We found them. Buchanan girls located.”
But Franklin didn’t move toward the car.
He was still looking at Valerie.
And now, his expression had changed again.
Not fear this time.
Recognition.
Or something dangerously close to it.
“Bring them home,” he told security.
Then, after a pause:
“And take Miss Monroe with us.”
The Buchanan penthouse was not a home.
It was a statement.
Glass walls wrapped around Manhattan like a crown. The city glittered below them, distant and unreal. Everything inside smelled faintly of cedar, expensive metal, and silence.
Valerie stood near the entrance, still in her cleaning uniform, feeling like she had been dropped into another planet without warning.
The twins refused to let go of her hands.
Franklin watched this carefully.
Too carefully.
“You said you didn’t know her,” one of the security men muttered.
“I don’t,” Franklin replied.
But his eyes said something else entirely.
A nurse arrived within minutes to check the girls. A lawyer arrived five minutes after that. Someone from child services tried to speak, but Franklin shut it down with a single phone call.
No one argued after that.
Eventually, the twins were coaxed into a room filled with soft lights and toys they had never been allowed to take outside the penthouse.
But before they left, Ashley turned back.
“Mommy,” she said again.
Valerie flinched like the word was physical.
Franklin saw it.
And that was when something shifted in him.
A decision forming.
He turned to Valerie.
“You need to come with me,” he said.
“To where?”
“To my office. I need answers.”
“I don’t have answers,” she said quickly. “I was just trying to help your daughters. That’s all this is.”
Franklin studied her face for a long moment.
Then he said something that made the air tighten.
“My daughters don’t call strangers ‘Mommy.’”
May you like
A pause.
“And they’ve never done it before.”
