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I sit up in bed.

Even in her sleep, she clings to me. And fuck if it doesn’t do the strangest things to me.

My heart is racing now. Every single muscle in my body protests as I stand, but I barely notice the pain. It doesn’t compare to the bittersweet melancholy that seizes my chest.

A man like me doesn’t deserve a woman like her.

She’s all the things I’m not—pure, sweet, innocent. I’ll only end up tainting her with my darkness if I let her into my world.

As if she can hear my thoughts, she opens her eyes. I’m the first thing she looks at. Her cheeks turn a soft rosy pink as she stares at me.

“It’s so much worse than I thought it would be,” she whispers.

“What?”

“You have bruises on your face,” she says. “They weren’t there last night.”

I glance in the mirror to see that she’s right. My skin is a mosaic of red and purple. One of my eyes is almost swollen shut.

“Does it scare you?” I ask her.

She sits up in bed and clutches the bedsheet to her chest. Her long hair tumbles around her in soft waves. She looks like she holds the answers to everything that’s been haunting me for years.

She shakes her head.

“You don’t scare me,” she says.

“I should,” I say. “You should have run away when you first saw me. You should have never taken the job offer. You should have never looked back.”

The expression on her face doesn’t change as she looks at me.

It’s one of the things about her that scares me the most—how she looks at me like she can see straight through me. Like she knows me better than I know myself.

“I know what it’s like,” she says quietly. “To have an anxious heart. To feel like everything you’re doing is wrong. To feel like nothing will ever be okay again.”

We look at each other for a moment.

This girl is forcing me to look at the ugliest parts of myself. She’s making me confront parts of me that I would rather not think about.

“I never had any peace of mind either,” she says. “There was always something.Even on my first night here, I received that threatening email. I was so scared then. But when I came out for fresh air, I found you by the pool. You were nothing but rude to me, but still, I was comforted by your presence.”

My chest rises and falls as I stare at her. All I want to do is take her into my arms again. But I’m afraid that if I do that, I’ll never be able to let her go.

“What I’m trying to say is, I’m here for you if you need me,” she says. “You were there for me when I needed someone, and I want to return that favor.”

“I wasn’t doing you a favor,” I say. “I was just thinking about the kids’ safety.”

“If it was just about the kids, you would have gotten a different nanny,” she says.

“Getting a new one was too much work.” I square my shoulders.

We reach a stalemate.

There are no winners or losers in this game. All I need to do now is make sure that what happened last night can never happen again.

“You may leave now,” I say.

She stares at me for a moment.