Trapped by the Amnesiac Billionaire

Six years. That was how long it had been since his memory was wiped clean. I rushed my feverstricken daughter into the hospital.

No one knew that back then, when he collapsed in a pool of his own blood to save me and was forced to have his memories violently erased, I was already carrying his child.

Until today. My heart hammered in my throat as I shoved open the door to the examination room. Nora was burning up, completely delirious from the fever.

The second she saw the doctor, her chapped lips parted. "Daddy." Brooks froze. He slowly lifted his gaze.

He stared at the little girl whose features were a striking reflection of his own.

Then, his dark eyes shifted and locked onto me—heavy, pinning me in place, and burning with an unreadable, dangerous intensity.

Chapter 1 I stepped back, my body moving before my brain could catch up. But just as the instinct to turn and flee seized me, reality crashed down. Brooks didn't remember me.

To him, I was a stranger. I tightened my grip on Nora and forced my legs to carry me forward. The examination was fast.

Brooks efficiently filled out a lab requisition for blood work. "The flu has been going around," he stated, his voice completely professional. "High probability it's that." I avoided his gaze, murmuring a quick thank you before hurrying Nora to the lab.

Nora was so burned out by the fever she passed out. My usually timid little girl, who was terrified of pain, didn't even whimper when the needle pierced her vein.

Watching her, my chest tightened so hard it felt like my ribs were caving in, stealing the oxygen from my lungs as we waited for the results.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second before flagging down a passing nurse. "Is there another pediatrician on call tonight?" I never thought Brooks would leave New York for Seattle.

And the astronomical odds of running into him out of the dozens of hospitals in this sprawling city made my stomach churn.

The nurse opened her mouth to reply, but her eyes flicked to a spot just over my shoulder. My pulse spiked. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I followed her line of sight.

Brooks. He smoothly slipped the medical card right out of my hand, giving the nurse a subtle nod that sent her scurrying away.

He stepped up to the kiosk, swiping the card with practiced ease to pull up the lab results. His eyes scanned the screen for merely seconds. "Influenza A.

With an IV drip, the fever should break before dawn." Before I could even exhale, his towering frame shifted, blocking out the harsh fluorescent lights of the hallway.

He paused, leaning down until his presence was a suffocating weight. His low, dark voice crashed over me. "I'm the only one in the pediatric ward tonight.

Insisting on a switch… is it because you think I can't satisfy your needs?" He heard me. I felt the blood drain from my face.

Meeting his pitchblack, unnervingly quiet stare, my mind flatlined. I couldn't even formulate a coherent lie.

I swallowed hard, forcing the words through my tight throat. "No," I said, stepping back slightly. "Nora has a weak immune system. She gets sick a lot. Dr.

Keller has always been her attending." Brooks gave a slow, barely perceptible nod. His dark lashes lowered, completely masking whether he bought my excuse or saw right through it.

He handled the IV insertion himself. The pinch of the needle must have been uncomfortable because Nora's heavy eyelids fluttered open.

Blinded by the fever and unable to focus, her tiny arms reached out, instinctively latching onto him. "Daddy," she mumbled into his scrubs. Brooks's gaze dropped.

His large hands moved with lightning reflexes, steadying her small, swaying body before she could fall.

Then, his eyes dragged slowly back up, sweeping across my face with an unreadable weight. That was the second time. The second time Nora had called him 'Daddy' right to his face.

If I didn't know for a concrete fact that I'd never taught her that word, I would've suspected I was some scheming golddigger trying to trap him into paying a massive settlement.

Thankfully, Brooks didn't seem suspicious.

He just asked, his tone deceptively flat, "Why are you at the hospital alone at two in the morning?" His eyes narrowed slightly. "Where's the father?" I clenched my jaw.

Meeting his probing stare, I tilted my chin up like a lioness shielding her cub, the words slicing through the air like ice. "He's dead.

Stone cold dead." Brooks went perfectly still. The muscle in his jaw feathered, his sharp features caught in the harsh halflight of the room.

In the suffocating, pindrop silence, he repeated it, dragging out each syllable. "Dead?" Cold sweat slicked my palms. I gave him a single, uncompromising nod.

I'd survived all these years telling that exact same lie, anyway. Brooks and I had a buried history.

My deadbeat, gamblingaddict of a father had wiped out every last cent to our name. Desperate to cover my college tuition, I intentionally painted a target on Brooks's back.

There was a legendary rumor circulating campus back then: anyone who got dumped by the untouchable Brooks walked away with a massive, lifechanging breakup settlement.

Chapter 2 Driven to a dead end, I swallowed my pride, cornered Brooks on the campus rooftop, and practically threw myself at him with a desperate confession.

No one would have guessed that the untouchable, glacially cold Brooks would be so shockingly easy to catch. Not a single flicker of surprise crossed his sharp features.

Just as my chin hit my chest, bracing for the humiliating rejection, his large hand shot out and yanked the hood of my sweatshirt over my head.

I blindly swatted the fabric away from my eyes. Brooks was leaning against the railing, halflidded eyes studying me from the shadows.

His voice was low, barely a rumble over the wind. "Alright. I'm yours." He was highmaintenance as hell, demanding and impossible to please.

Every morning, he’d have his assistant deliver expensive, freshly baked artisanal croissants and pitchblack coffee.

He would take one critical bite, decide it wasn't to his liking, and aggressively shove the rest into my hands.

He'd just sit there, his dark eyes fixed on me, refusing to look away until I swallowed every last crumb.

When I was pulling night shifts and we couldn't see each other, he demanded I stay on the phone with him for at least an hour. He barely even spoke.

The line would just be dead air, save for the steady, low cadence of his breathing over the receiver. I had no idea what the hell the point of it was.

Meanwhile, the loan sharks were practically camping outside the campus gates.

Panicking because the rumored breakup payout hadn't materialized, I was burning the candle at both ends, pulling backtoback shifts just to survive. I barely even saw Brooks.

I spun some pathetic lie about a sick family member needing cash, claiming I was too slammed to hang out. I was a terrible liar; the excuse was pathetic. But he didn't push it.

Instead, I opened my textbook the next day to find a sleek black credit card with no limit tucked between the pages. Until one night, reality caught up with me.

Several tweakedout street thugs cornered me in a deadend alley. Just as they closed in with filthy, predatory grins, Brooks descended on them like an unhinged tyrant.

It was a bloodbath. He broke them down singlehandedly, leaving the junkies writhing and howling on the concrete with shattered bones.

His face was a mask of pure, lethal fury as he wiped their blood from his busted knuckles.

Then, he snatched my violently trembling body against his chest, swallowed me up in his heavy, expensive trench coat, and shielded me as we strode out of the darkness.

My chest tight, I stared at his windmussed hair, the rigid line of his jaw, and the fresh blood welling from the split skin on his knuckles.

Did Brooks know I only targeted him for a payout? Were those loan sharks going to drag him into my hellish reality? A sickening wave of guilt washed over me.

The money wasn't worth this. I pressed my lips together, fully intending to confess everything and end it right there.

Before I could even open my mouth, his cold, commanding voice cut through the air. "My sister is looking for a tutor for her kid." The abrupt shift gave me whiplash, but his underlying intention hit me like a freight train.

I stared at him, utterly bewildered that his newly born nephew wasn't even two months old. Was this what the elite one percent did?

Prepping infants for the Ivy League before they could even hold up their own heads? But if I took this, my debt to him would only deepen.

It was just like that black card—the one sitting untouched in my drawer.

I could stomach swiping a severance check after he inevitably grew bored of me, but I absolutely couldn't touch his personal money.

Because anything tainted with actual, genuine care was something I fundamentally didn't deserve.

I opened my mouth to shoot the offer down, but he saw right through me, casually raising his bruised, bloody knuckles into my line of sight. "Take the job," he demanded, his tone leaving zero room for argument. "Consider it payback for my medical expenses." Chapter 3 A ridiculous, terrifying thought suddenly clawed its way into my mind back then.

Was it possible Brooks actually fell for me? I never asked, and he never pushed.

He didn't demand to know why those junkies had cornered me in that alley, or why I was bleeding through money like a bottomless pit. But after that night, the loan sharks vanished.

Poof. Wiped from my existence. I stumbled through the rest of my college years in a daze, yet untouchable under his shadow. He indulged my every whim.

He catered to my every demand, silently playing along with the pathetic lies I'd spun about needing cash.

He was so consumed by me that by the time the real female lead finally made her delayed entrance, it was too late for her to complete her designated mission.

Brooks and I were a catastrophic mismatch. Different worlds, different tax brackets. I offered zero leverage for a corporate marriage alliance.

His billionaire family threw every conceivable roadblock in our path to tear us apart. Those months were pure hell.

Frozen trust funds, suffocating family pressure, Vivienne's sudden, calculated appearance. But through it all, not once did Brooks ever breathe a word about walking away.

Until my deadbeat spermdonor of a father held a knife to my throat, demanding a tenmilliondollar ransom from Brooks.

The blade that was meant to sever my arteries ended up buried deep in Brooks's chest when he threw himself into the line of fire to shield me.

As Brooks slipped into a critical coma, I finally came facetoface with the socalled female lead and her bizarre system.

That crazy bitch Vivienne kept muttering to herself about some bullshit system and plotline.

According to her manic ranting, I was supposed to be killed off during that hostage situation, dying tragically to become the haunting, untouchable ghost that Brooks would never get over.

But too bad for her. I survived. The price for the universe correcting its course? His memories were wiped. I was erased from his mind.

Just like that, the plot snapped back onto its predetermined tracks.

The day Brooks woke up, I stood completely alone in the corner of his VIP suite, watching him surrounded by an army of doctors and sycophants.

His eyes were perfectly calm, his demeanor cooperative. When his gaze accidentally swept over me, there was nothing but glacial, empty indifference. A stranger.

I stood there, frozen, watching the heavy mahogany door slowly click shut, sealing me out of his world.

I didn't know how long I waited before I finally turned on my heel and hammered the elevator button for the lobby.

I stared blankly at the glowing numbers plummeting downward, quietly accepting the absolute finality of my erasure.

The second the elevator chimed at the ground floor, a rush of memories hit me. That absurd rumor about his breakup payouts.

The way his jaw clenched when he forcefully shoved that black card into my textbook. The vacant, unfeeling way his eyes had just slid right past me through the hospital glass.

A brutal, agonizing clarity washed over me. Never again would there be a man who would take a metal pipe to the back to protect me.

Never again would someone grip my hand and drag me out of the darkness without ever looking back. I snapped back to the sterile scent of the present.

Brooks's expression was utterly flat. My declaration that Nora's father was dead didn't even cause a ripple in his composure.

He simply offered a slow, clinical assessment. "Is that so?

What a shame." Over the past six years, going through labor alone, sitting in countless waiting rooms alone, people inevitably asked about her father.

At first, the question would paralyze me. But eventually, I learned to just look them dead in the eye and tell them he was buried in the ground.

Sometime in the dead of the night, exhaustion finally dragged me under.

When I blinked awake to the gray light of dawn filtering through the blinds, a heavy, warm blanket had been draped over my shoulders. The IV bag was nearly empty.

Nora's skin had finally lost its fiery heat. My slight movement must have woken her, because her heavy eyes fluttered open. "Was that Daddy?" she whispered.

I brushed her damp hair back from her forehead. "No, baby," I murmured. I will never let you be dragged into the sick, twisted vortex of his predetermined fate.

I pulled her closer. "You are mine. Only mine." Chapter 4 She let out a soft "oh" and buried her face into my shoulder, going completely silent.

Just as the nurse pulled the IV and taped a cotton ball to the crook of her arm, the elevator doors down the hall chimed open. Heavy, hurried footsteps strode toward us.

The second he saw me, his shoulders dropped in a massive wave of relief. "Noelle, why the hell didn't you call me when Nora got sick?" I stared at Asher in total shock.

I never expected him to actually track me down here. Asher was my boss.

He explained that he’d just woken up to my PTO text, and when my phone went straight to voicemail, he took a shot in the dark and drove to the hospital closest to my apartment.

I dug my phone out of my pocket and tapped the black screen. Dead battery. He let out a long breath and offered to drive us home.

Before I could answer, the heavy door to the examination room clicked open. Brooks stepped out into the hallway.

He'd shed his white coat, the exhaustion of a grueling night shift hanging in the sharp lines around his eyes.

He dangled a set of car keys from one hand. "I can drop you off on my way—" The words died in his throat the second his eyes locked onto Asher. Brooks froze midstep.

A flash of genuine surprise crossed both their faces before quickly morphing into something much colder.

The air in the corridor suddenly felt thick enough to cut with a scalpel. "Wait…" I glanced between them. "You guys know each other?" Asher recovered first.

A halfsmile playing on his lips, he casually shoved his hands into his pockets. "We grew up next door to each other." I just stared at them, my brain shortcircuiting.

I had spent six years desperately trying to sever all ties to Brooks, only to find out the universe had a sick sense of humor.

What an absolute, suffocatingly small world. "Then I won't interrupt your reunion," I muttered, adjusting my grip on Nora. Brooks didn't even blink.

His jaw tightened, his voice dropping to a low, dismissive gravel. "We were just neighbors who shared an irritatingly similar taste in things, yet he consistently choked in every single sport and competition against me." He leveled a glacial stare at Asher. "We aren't close.

There's nothing to catch up on." The hostility radiating off him was jarring. In my memories, Brooks was always apathetic, drifting through life unfazed by anyone or anything.

I’d rarely seen him bare his teeth like this. A childhood reunion, and he goes straight for the jugular. Asher didn't even flinch.

His smile remained perfectly intact, acting like he hadn't heard a single word of the insult. He turned back to me. "Getting into a stranger's car is never a smart move.

I'm parked right out front. Let me take you and Nora home." His offer landed on empty air.

While the two of them were busy having a staredown in the middle of the hallway, I had already dragged my exhausted body into the elevator with Nora.

I maintained direct eye contact with both of them and slammed my finger onto the 'Close Door' button. "Asher," I said, pasting on a polite, detached smile. "You have a desk buried in contracts waiting for your approval.

I wouldn't dream of wasting your time." He stared in brief disbelief before a low chuckle escaped him, shaking his head.

I dropped my gaze to the scuffed linoleum floor, refusing to meet the heavy, unreadable stare Brooks had pinned on me.

The metal doors slid shut, sealing away the suffocating tension, and didn't open again until we hit the ground floor.

I managed to borrow a charger from the lobby desk just long enough to power up my phone. My Uber driver immediately texted, saying he was idling at the hospital entrance.

I typed a quick, "Be right there," and slipped the phone back into my pocket. I was doing just fine on my own. The flu is a relentless, lingering nightmare.

A full week dragged by before Nora's fever finally broke for good, but she was still left with this nasty, rattling cough.

Terrified it might spiral into pneumonia, I burned another PTO day and dragged her back to the clinic for a stronger prescription.

Honestly, ditching Asher at the elevator like that had been a massive gamble. Disrespecting your boss to his face wasn't exactly a careerbuilding move.

But Asher didn't seem to hold a grudge. He never pried into my glaringly obvious history with Brooks, and when I asked for today off, he approved it without missing a beat.

Fully paid. Walking through the sliding glass doors of the hospital, only one thought echoed in my head: I would happily grind away at my desk for that man until the day I died.

Chapter 5 Maybe I was terrified of a repeat of that suffocating, heartstopping encounter from last time.

This time, I deliberately took the long way around, dragging Nora to a completely different toptier hospital across town. The wait for our number was agonizingly slow.

After a while, Nora gave the hem of my shirt a random, sharp tug.

Frowning, I looked down to ask her what was wrong, but my eyes automatically followed her line of sight to the corner of the corridor. Brooks.

He was surrounded by a swarm of residents hanging onto his every word.

Catching fragments of their conversation over the PA system, I gathered he was here leading some sort of crosshospital medical exchange.

As if sensing a shift in the air, his dark eyes snapped in our direction. My vision actually swam. What a suffocatingly small world.

Panic flared, and I instantly ducked my head, staring holes into the floor tiles. He wouldn't notice me. Both Nora and I had our medical masks pulled up high.

He saw hundreds of patients a day; there was zero chance he'd remember the paranoid mother he'd met for five minutes a week ago.

Until the overhead speaker blared Nora's ticket number. I grabbed Nora's small hand and practically dragged her toward the clinic door.

But out of my peripheral vision, I caught movement.

Brooks, who for some inexplicable reason hadn't moved a single inch from that corner, suddenly lifted his head and pinned his gaze dead on me.

This time, Nora didn't call out 'Daddy'. When our eyes locked, the hard lines of his face visibly thawed.

He lowered his thick lashes, his expression softening as he offered the little girl a surprisingly gentle, reassuring smile.

Maybe he stared too long, or maybe the smile was just too out of character for the usually icecold doctor. The residents bombarding him with questions followed his gaze to Nora.

One of them couldn't help but ask, "Dr. Brooks, do you know them?" Brooks didn't deny it. His gaze drifted over me, light but carrying an absolute weight. "Yeah.

A kid of an acquaintance." Even after I shoved the clinic door shut behind us, my skin prickled.

I could physically feel the heat of his quiet, intense stare burning a hole right between my shoulder blades. My muscles locked up tight. Every nerve ending screamed at me to bolt.

I had no idea if it was just a convenient excuse or something else entirely.

He'd looked his childhood neighbor dead in the eye and claimed they were strangers, yet casually branded a random patient's mother as an acquaintance.

I couldn't focus on a single word the pediatrician was saying. The blood was roaring in my ears. When we finally emerged with the new prescription, Brooks was still there.

For whatever reason, the swarm of residents had vanished, leaving him alone by the triage desk, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

I hit the elevator button for the ground floor and hit the pharmacy. The entire time, Brooks trailed us—keeping a calculated, deliberate distance. He didn't say a single word.

My lungs finally managed to expand. We'd only been inside for an hour, but the clear skies had collapsed into a torrential downpour.

My Uber driver called, yelling over the Bluetooth that the hospital entrance was gridlocked and demanding I drag myself out to the bus stop three blocks away.

I wasn't about to stand in the rain and argue. I hit cancel.

Brooks chose that exact second to speak. "Can I drive you this time?" It was a low, quiet demand, yet it sliced right through the chaotic hospital noise and the deafening roar of the rain.

My knuckles turned white around the pharmacy bag. I sucked in a sharp breath. "Can you just lend me an umbrella, Dr. Brooks?" Brooks didn't move.

His gaze dropped to Nora, heavily loaded with implication. "I could do that," he stated. "But are you really going to drag a sick, fiveyearold child out into a thunderstorm just to prove a point, risking her fever spiking all over again?" I locked eyes with him.

His dark stare was infuriatingly calm, utterly unyielding. After three agonizing seconds, I jerked my head away. He had me cornered, and we both knew it. I folded.

Chapter 6 Brooks's car was parked in the underground garage. Before he could even unlock it, a woman dripping in designer labels stepped out from the shadows.

Vivienne. "I've been waiting for you forever," she whined, her voice laced with sicklysweet entitlement. My breath hitched.

A sharp, physical pain seized my chest as the chaotic, agonizing memories from six years ago violently crashed into me. He could already be married to her.

They probably had a kid exactly Nora's age. It wasn't until Nora's tiny, anxious fingers gripped my hand tightly that I realized my body was trembling.

Vivienne's cloying voice abruptly died the second her eyes locked onto Nora and me.

She stared at Brooks in sheer disbelief. "Brooks, don't tell me you secretly came to Seattle just to find her?" As the realization set in, a vicious sneer twisted her perfectly painted lips. "You'd go this far for an ex you don't even remember?

Do you even know the truth?" She pointed a manicured finger at me. "Every ounce of her affection for you was completely fake.

She only ever got close to you because she wanted a payout." I instantly clamped my hands over Nora's ears. A child shouldn't hear this toxic garbage.

I grabbed Nora, pivoting on my heel to bolt. But a large, calloused hand clamped down hard around my wrist.

Brooks yanked the rear car door open and firmly nudged us into the backseat. "Get in and wait for me." I sat frozen on the leather seat, my mind blank.

The dark past I'd practically bled to keep buried had just been ripped open and screamed into the quiet garage by Vivienne. But she was dead wrong.

My running into Brooks was just a sick, twisted cosmic joke. He was just doing his duty as a doctor, offering a ride in a storm. After tonight, we'd go back to being strangers.

The muffled sounds from outside the tinted glass drifted in.

Brooks spat out a few icy words. "And?" "How is that any of your business?" He disgustedly threw off Vivienne's grasp, looking at his suit jacket as if a maggot had crawled onto it.

His gaze stripped her down to nothing but gutter trash. "Security, drag this lunatic out of here.

Don't let her contaminate my car." Uniformed security guards swarmed the scene within seconds, forcibly tearing a hysterical Vivienne away.

In the distance, police sirens wailed, the officers practically bowing in apology to Brooks when they arrived. He was the untouchable youngest heir of the Brooks empire.

With his older siblings holding down the billionaire dynasty, he had the absolute luxury of doing whatever the hell he wanted—even playing doctor just for the thrill of it.

No one in their right mind dared to cross a titan family like his.

I heard his glacial voice deliver the final blow to Vivienne. "Stop following me." His tone carried a lethal warning. "Or next time, I won't just be calling the cops." When Brooks slid back into the driver's seat, our eyes collided in the rearview mirror for a fraction of a second.

It wasn't until the sleek SUV roared out of the underground garage that he casually tossed his phone into my lap. I jumped, staring at the screen in confusion. "Passcode is 0513.

Put your address in the GPS." I stared at the device, my fingers moving numbly to type in my apartment complex, before handing it back to him.

I never thought he'd still be using that specific date. 0513. May 13th. The exact day I cornered him on the campus rooftop and forced that confession.

A sudden, suffocating tightness gripped my chest.

Feigning casual curiosity, I forced the words out. "Why that passcode?" The robotic voice of the GPS echoed through the quiet cabin.

Over the hum of the engine, his voice was flat, detached. "I don't remember." I wasn't disappointed. It just confirmed what I already knew.

His memory was wiped, and he simply couldn't be bothered to reset an old passcode.

But just as the thought settled, Brooks glanced in the rearview mirror, as if effortlessly peeling back my skull to read my mind. "Must be an incredibly important date," he added, his dark eyes locking onto mine in the reflection.

My heart skipped a beat. Chapter 7 I didn't reply. I had absolutely no idea what to say, so I opted to keep my mouth shut. The fivemile drive took barely fifteen minutes.

The torrential downpour showed zero signs of letting up. My rundown apartment complex didn't have an underground garage.

When we pulled up, Brooks stepped out into the biting rain and popped open a massive black umbrella. He tilted the canopy entirely over Nora and me.

It wasn't until we finally rushed into the dim lobby that I noticed half of his crisp, expensive shirt was soaked through, clinging to his skin.

Seeing him dripping wet like a drowned rat, a rare prick of guilt actually managed to pierce through my defensive shell. "Dr.

Brooks, seriously, thank you for today." Brooks let out a low, humorless chuckle. "Are we just doing verbal thankyous now, Ms. Noelle?

Not going to invite me up for a hot cup of coffee to thaw out?" I stared at him.

I seriously started calculating the odds that he'd deliberately soaked himself just to guilttrip me into this.

But looking at his damp, dark hair and the water pooling around his Italian leather shoes, I simply didn't have the spine to slam the door in his face.

The automatic rejection died in my throat. I pasted on a painfully polite smile, practically grinding my teeth. "Of course not.

After you." The shrill whistle of the kettle snapped me out of my trance.

I barely had a drop of rain on me, but my brain must have been waterlogged for me to actually agree to let Brooks step foot inside my apartment. I tossed him a clean towel.

As he dried off, it hit me that he was moving around my cramped living room with the effortless ease of someone who practically owned the place.

I definitely felt the heavy, probing weight of his stare tracking my every move.

Panic flared in my chest, sending me scrambling into the tiny kitchen under the guise of making coffee.

By the time I walked back out with two steaming mugs, the living room was empty. A sliver of warm light spilled from the halfopen door of the den.

I softened my footsteps and peeked inside. Brooks was sitting on the worn rug with Nora, several picture books scattered around them.

I heard Nora's small voice pipe up. "What kind of bug is that?" Brooks stared down at the dead insect on the floorboards. A beat of absolute silence passed.

Probably terrified of traumatizing the little girl, he smoothly deployed its Latin classification. "Periplaneta americana." Living in a cheap, humid apartment building meant these nasty pests were impossible to eradicate.

But the scene instantly triggered a buried memory from years ago. Back in college, I lived in a shoebox apartment that was infinitely worse than this one.

On a stormy summer day, Brooks had barged into my place exactly like today.

When I walked out of my room, he was standing there pinching a brown bug with a disgusted scowl. "Why do you have a Harpalus ground beetle crawling around your apartment?" he had demanded.

Wow. Fancy scientific name. Never heard of it.

I kept my face totally deadpan and hit him with the brutal truth. "That’s a cockroach." That was the first time I ever saw Brooks's flawless composure shatter.

His face totally flatlined. Fast forward to today, and Brooks had finally learned how to identify a basic roach.

And to avoid scaring a fiveyearold, he smoothly dropped its scientific alias without batting an eye.

But Nora just let out a simple "Oh," and pointed a chubby finger at it. "I remember now. That's a cockroach." Brooks froze.

I never thought I'd see the day the razorsharp Brooks was left completely speechless by a toddler. I stood frozen in the hallway, quietly watching them.

Then, I realized my cheeks hurt. I was actually smiling.

After swiftly disposing of the nasty carcass, Brooks settled back down on the rug to flip through a dusty photo album with Nora.

She tapped her small finger against a faded photograph. "You look a lot like my daddy." Chapter 8