The Billionaire's Nanny: A BWWM Romantic Comedy by Mia Caldwell Page B

instructor told us not to come back, that our energy was bad for the other couples and bad for our baby.”
    “Maeve’s doing okay,” I say, suddenly feeling the need to defend her.
    “She is.” Corbin squeezes my hand, “Things have been much better for her lately.”
    He walks on for a bit, we’re winding in and out of the rows. The house, on a hill, glows above us like a fairytale castle.
    “We fought in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” he says at last, grimly.
    “Even happy couples fight in labor,” I say.
    “Yeah, but it just never stopped. Something started to go wrong on the way. The EMTs were telling her not to push and she was telling them to shut the fuck up, she’d do what she wanted. The last thing I said to her, when we got to the hospital and they whisked her away was ‘For fuck’s sake Elise, can you just stop being a bitch long enough to give birth?’”
    I have nothing to add there, so we’re quiet for a bit.
    “That’s the last thing I said to her. My wife. She hemorrhaged and died. Too quickly for them to do a thing. Her mother screamed”Murderer!" at me in the waiting room. She knew we fought all the time. She blamed me, saying it was our fighting that made the delivery go wrong. My parents had no idea anything was less than sunny. Well, until then."
    He’s quiet for the length of a whole row. Finally he looks up at the starry sky and sighs. “This is the hard part,” he says.
    I’m quiet, wondering how it gets worse than losing your wife in childbirth and having her mother call you a murderer.
    “I left. I walked out of the hospital. I never even held my newborn daughter.”
    Corbin’s voice is tight. I’m shocked, but I squeeze his hand and he squeezes back and is quiet for a while. I can hear that his breathing is ragged and I want to give him space to deal with it how he wants to. I don’t want to say “Are you okay” and open the floodgates because I think he’d hate that. But I don’t know. Because I don’t know him.
    Finally, he takes in a deep breath of air and it only catches a little. "I went to India and I stayed for seven months. My parents took care of Maeve. My sisters all have kids, so there was lots of baby gear around and they just stepped up and took care of this helpless newborn.
    “God, I’ve been such a shit. I felt guilty about Elise dying. I was angry that she left me with a baby that…” he swallows. "Well, a baby I never wanted. And then I felt guilty about that. So I just ran off to India, presumably to work. I hoped I could either find spiritual enlightenment or work myself to death. In the end, it was spirits–booze–and I tried to drink myself to death. I was a completely self-indulgent piece of crap for about three months. I never spoke to my parents, I never asked about Maeve. They knew where I was, but left me alone, no doubt telling themselves they weren’t surprised it had come to this, a fuckup like me.
    "And when I realized that, when I saw that I was falling right back into it, I fought back. I stopped drinking. I started learning yoga and lifting weights. I started to go out into the community and realized that if I moved the textile mill, I’d destroy all these lives, wreck this village. So I instead worked to make conditions there better, to make the plant more efficient and cost effective so that I could sell the rest of the company on keeping our operation in Gujarat.
    “I even started to ask about Maeve. It’s funny, her name was one of the very few things Elise and I agreed on. We fought over the middle name–I wanted Frances, after the sister born two years before me that died in infancy, she wanted Eleanor, after her richest aunt.”
    I realize I don’t know Maeve’s middle name. “Who won?”
    “She did. I even felt guilty about resenting that at first. My parents had been sending me photos of her all along and I started printing them out and hanging them up. I started Skyping with them so Maeve could