By the time I pressed Enter, my hands were shaking harder than they ever had in front of guns, federal agents, or men planning my funeral.

Golden sunlight filled the family room on the recorded feed from three o'clock that afternoon.

Julieta was sitting on the thick wool rug. Noah, my eighteen-month-old boy who usually cried whenever strangers approached, was fast asleep against one of her shoulders, his small fist clutching the fabric of her sleeve. Gianna clung to the collar of Julieta's gray uniform, babbling softly.

Julieta was still wearing the heavy, bright cleaning gloves I had ordered her to wear as a petty humiliation. They looked absurd on her small hands, clumsy and loud against the soft cotton of her dress.

Yet she didn't take them off. She couldn't, because she knew I checked the cameras from my phone.

She hummed softly, a low, melodic lullaby from her childhood.

Gianna stirred, reaching up with sticky fingers.

“Shh,” Julieta whispered, her voice cracking slightly with exhaustion. “Papa will be home soon.”

Noah opened his heavy eyelids, blinking against the light.

“Dada?” he mumbled.

“Yes,” Julieta smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners with profound affection. “Your daddy.”

Gianna reached toward Julieta's face, her tiny fingers smudging dirt across the nanny’s cheek. Julieta didn't pull away. Instead, she leaned into the small hand and kissed Gianna’s fingertips one by one through the thick rubber of the cleaning glove.

“He loves you more than anything,” she whispered to the empty room.

I stopped breathing. The air in my private office felt heavy, suffocating.

The woman I had treated like a criminal this morning—the woman I had forced to scrub marble floors in rubber gloves like an indentured servant—was defending me to my own children. She was preserving my image in their tiny minds, ensuring they knew their father loved them, even when I spent fourteen hours a day locked behind steel doors avoiding them because they reminded me too much of the ghost of Catherine.

Then Noah started crying, a sharp, sudden wail of toddler frustration.

Julieta didn't sigh. She didn't snap. She pulled him closer, cradling his head against her chest.

“You miss Mama?” she murmured.

The boy couldn't answer. He was too young to understand death, too young to articulate the phantom ache of a mother who had vanished before he could learn her face.

But Julieta understood.

Her voice softened until it was barely a breath. “I know, my sweet boy. I know.”

She held both children tight against her body, rocking them in a slow, rhythmic circle. “You can miss her. Nobody gets angry because you miss Mama. It's okay to cry.”

Something inside my chest fractured.

A hot, heavy tear broke free and landed squarely beside my computer keyboard.

I stared down at it in horror. I hadn't cried at Catherine's funeral. I hadn't shed a tear when my father was buried in a wet Chicago cemetery. I had locked my emotions away behind a vault door of ice and steel.

But I cried watching a stranger hold the broken pieces of my family together when she thought nobody in the world could see her.