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Noah still hadn’t said a word. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Noah?” I touched his arm tentatively. “Talk to me.”

He opened his mouth, but his phone rang and cut him off. He handed mine back to me before he picked up.

Ice trickled through my veins as his expression went from dark to positively thunderous. He didn’t say anything except for a few terse replies, but when he hung up a minute later, he looked as though someone had sucked all the air out of him.

“That was Harry,” he said, naming his family lawyer. His face had gone pale. “The Andersons just filed for sole custody of Evie.”

CHAPTER 43

NOAH

I was numb. Hollow, like someone had reached into my chest and yanked out every emotion except shock.

I hadn’t felt this devastated since I received the call telling me Sarah had died, but when that initial shock subsided—when I calmed down enough to fully comprehend what the Andersons were trying to pull—the numbness morphed into pure, incandescent rage.

Fuck the Andersons. Fuck them and the uppity horse they rode in on. Fuck their arrogance, condescension, and “we know better” energy. If they thought they could take Evie away from me because I was suffering some bad press, they’d just made the biggest mistake of their lives.

That rage was what held me together when Carina and I flew back to London the next day. I had to cut our Kruger trip short, but she didn’t protest at all. She didn’t try to make me talk about my feelings either. She simply stuck by my side, a calm, steady presence that kept me from unraveling completely.

I’d chartered a last-minute private flight, and I spent the entire time on calls with Harry, my agent, and my publicist. I tried but failed to sleep. I also hadn’t talked to my parents or Evie yet. They’d called and texted several times after seeing the headlines, but the custody situation wasn’t public, and I was putting off our conversation until I had a plan for how to fix this.

But after a week of brainstorming and strategizing with my team, I still didn’t have a solid plan.

“The Andersons are using their visits with Evie to build the case that they would be better guardians for her,” Harry said. “They knew a judge would laugh them out of court if they asked for custody without ever having met her—unless they could prove severe abuse or neglect, which they can’t—so they played the long game. I imagine they were planning to keep those visits going for a while before filing for custody, but the, ah, recent press forced their hand earlier than expected. They probably think this is the best time to strike, considering…everything.”

I paced my room, my pulse pounding against my temples. I’d been back in London for six days, and I’d slept a total of maybe twelve hours. My body begged for rest, but my mind was too wired to comply.

“That’s bullshit,” I fumed. “A few visits don’t erase eleven years of absence. No judge would believe that nonsense either.”

“Maybe not, but they have enough money and connections to put up a decent fight. The system isn’t always fair. Plus, the comments from your former nannies have complicated the picture, as have, uh, other developments.”

I stopped, my jaw locking. The goddamn nannies. I should’ve known they’d come back to bite me in the ass.

I’d hoped my “scandal” would die down once the media got bored of rehashing the same thing over and over again. Taken at face value, dating my daughter’s nanny might raise some eyebrows, but it wasn’t a cheating allegation or a criminal pursuit either. It was my love life. That was it.

However, the frenzy had intensified after someone leaked the racy messages “I’d” sent them via Konnect. I hadn’t sent shit; they were the two or three DMs Gallagher managed to fire off before I wrestled Adil’s phone back from him all those months ago. The person who’d received it had spotted an opportunity to bolster her fifteen minutes of fame, and she’d seized it. It didn’t matter that Konnect was built for public figures and that sharing screenshots was forbidden, nor did it matter that the leaker had been banned from the app for life. The damage was already done.

Once the first leaks came out, the rest of the floodgates opened. New stories surfaced faster than I could count them—anonymous reports of Carina and me attending Samson’s end-of-the-season party together; a grainy picture of us walking down the street after we left the London Eye; more reports of me partying at the pub while Evie was “neglected and alone at home.” Some held grains of truth while others were straight fabrications; all were twisted in a way to make me look like the world’s shittiest father.

But the worst was the bevy of former nannies who’d jumped at the chance to smear me. They painted me as difficult, unreasonable, and temperamental, and while I hadn’t always been the most tactful when I’d fired them, I wasn’t the monster they made me out to be either.

“The smallest thing would set him off,” one was quoted as saying. “I asked him if he wanted to talk because he’d had a rough week, and he absolutely lost it. Fired me on the spot for ‘violating boundaries’ even though I only wanted to talk. What type of person does that?” Another former nanny claimed I’d let her go for letting Evie eat ice cream before dinner once, while a third spun a tale about how Evie got burned trying to make bacon because I hadn’t been paying attention. She’d neglected to mention that I’d been getting dressed for work upstairs, and she’d been the one in charge of making breakfast for Evie.

They stayed anonymous, but it wasn’t hard to guess their identities. Hazel was definitely the first one, and those were the stories that rankled the most. I could weather the intrusions into my personal life, but the insinuation that I was too volatile to be a proper father was a punch in the gut. My lawyers went after them for violating their NDAs, but the damage had been done.

Harry was still talking. “I’m sorry, Noah,” he said. “I should’ve advised you better. I was hoping the visits would be enough to satisfy the Andersons, and that they wouldn’t be so foolish as to pour money into a fight that’s tipped heavily against them. Custody battles can be vicious, and given your priorities, I wanted to avoid drawn-out court proceedings.”

I stopped and took a measured breath. It was easy to place the blame at his feet, but this wasn’t all on him. I’d played a role in my own mess. “It’s not your fault. You told me to lay low and not court scandal, and I didn’t. Plus, I was fooled by the Andersons too. I should’ve known their cooperative act was just that. An act.” I ground my teeth, my jaw working. “I have my first mediation session with them on Friday.”

In the UK, joint mediation was the standard first step before any custody case reached a judge. The involved parties usually resolved their issues in three to five meetings; if not, then they could apply for court. Harry had worked his magic and accelerated the timeline so they wouldn’t drag into September, after the new school year and regular club season kicked off.

I’d already had my individual session with the mediator, and I was waiting for the first joint meeting. The best outcome I could hope for at this point was not strangling the Andersons with my bare hands.

“It’s your first mediation, so it’s important to remain calm,” Harry said. “They’ll try to bait you. Don’t let them.”

The following Friday, I kept Harry’s advice in mind and almost made it through the entire session without losing it. As he predicted, the Andersons tried to bait me by subtly alluding to the worst headlines about me, but I kept my cool—until the very end of the session.