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“I doubt it,” Chloe refuted. “Ellie clearly loves you.”

He grimaced, refusing to be derailed. “The point is, how do you know I’m not going anywhere? How does any of us know? What if something happens to me? Then what happens to Ellie?”

Chloe frowned like the idea had never occurred to her. “She can’t be that damned unlucky,” she said, with a shake of her head.

“Christos, I hope that’s true, for her sake. But what kind of guardian would I be to leave things up to chance?”

Chloe’s face grew pale. “There must be someone,” she said, eyes beseeching. “An aunt? A godmother? Ellie told me about the parties her mother threw. Surely one of those friends…”

“I don’t know them well enough to trust that they’ll take care of her. This is…Ellie,” he said, as though that explained everything. Hoping she’d understand. “I don’t want to leave this up to chance. I want her to have the best of the best.”

Contingency. Contingency. Contingency.

“I want her to have you.”

Chloe’s eyes fixed on his with ferocious intensity. “To have me how?”

“I want you to stay here. I want you to be in her life. I have seen her heal and progress more in the last week than I have in the years since we lost Ben. You’re important for her. You’re good for her. Please don’t go, Chloe.”

“This is…not fair,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’m…my life is in London.”

“Your job is flexible.”

“This isn’t fair,” she repeated, grinding out the words with determination now. “I hardly know you.”

He pulled a face to show his skepticism of that claim. He couldn’t say how, but Chloe had managed to get a read on both him and Ellie with embarrassing ease.

“There must be someone else.”

“There’s not.”

Her jaw shifted, her face was awash with consternation. And for a moment—a brief moment—he regretted asking this of her. But there was one thing he knew, without a shadow of a doubt.

He couldn’t do this without Chloe.

He’d spent the last six months feeling he was completely adrift, no idea how to help the most important person in his world, and then Chloe had appeared and it was like a light had been switched on. Light and glitter and magic, all at once. She had what he lacked: emotional intelligence and an ability to show how she felt.

She was incredible.

“No one else I want,” he said, and her eyes flared wide.

“What does that mean?” She asked the question cautiously.

He realized he’d come dangerously close to blurring the damn lines they’d worked so hard to draw. He chose his words carefully. “It means I could pay someone to be in her life, but that person still wouldn’t hold a candle to you. Because you care. You really care, and that’s what she needs.”

Chloe took a step back from him, reaching for her coffee cup and pulling it from the machine, taking a sip before responding. “You care, too,” she said. “You just have to work out how to show it.”

“Fine. And even if I do? There’s still just me.”

“There’s Jane.”

“She hasn’t warmed to Jane like you have. And vice versa. It has to be you.”

“No.”

“I knew about that damn photo,” he muttered. “It never occurred to me to frame it. My instinct was the opposite—never talk about them. Leave them in the shadows, because I thought if I spoke about Ben and Laura, it would make her sad.”

“And she thinks the same about you. You guys have to talk more. Be open with her. She’s not a toddler. You can tell her you don’t know how to do this, that you’re still working it out. She’ll respect your honesty, believe me.”