Two five-year-old twins were left on a bench at O’Hare without a kiss, without a goodbye, and without anyone turning back to see if they were crying. Their stepmother thought she could walk onto a plane and disappear—but she didn’t know the man watching from across the terminal had already decided those children would never be abandoned again.

Still, that night, I sat alone in my penthouse and felt something inside me ache with selfish disappointment.

Elise called me out on it the next morning.

“You wanted to keep them,” she said.

“No.”

“Ryker.”

I closed my eyes.

“I wanted them safe.”

“And with you.”

I said nothing.

“That doesn’t make you terrible,” she said. “It makes you attached.”

“They need family.”

“They also need people who love them enough not to turn this into a competition.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I almost laughed. “You ask that a lot.”

“You require repetition.”

Nathan began supervised visits.

At first, I stayed away from those. It seemed better. Cleaner.

But Lily asked for me.

Then Owen asked whether visits with Uncle Nathan meant visits with Ryker were “all done.”

Maya arranged one shared visit.

It was awkward at first.

Nathan brought a small wooden truck he had made in his workshop. Owen loved it immediately but pretended not to. Lily sat between us, looking from Nathan to me and back again, as if trying to understand whether caring about one adult might erase another.

Children who had lost too much often counted love like coins.

Maya noticed.

“You know,” she said gently, “people don’t run out of caring because there’s more than one person in the room.”

Owen rolled the wooden truck across the table. “What if they do?”

“Then they didn’t understand caring very well.”

Lily leaned against my arm.

Nathan saw it.

To his credit, he did not look jealous.

He looked grateful and sad.

After the visit, he caught me in the parking lot.

“I don’t want to take them from you,” he said.

“They’re not mine.”