Chapter 2 - The Heartbeat Lullaby
The moment the baby's weight settled into my arms, the sheer responsibility of it almost crushed me.
He was so small. So red-faced and furious at the world.
I didn't hesitate. I shifted him, placing his ear directly against the center of my chest, right over my collarbone.
I wrapped my left arm securely under his legs, bringing his knees up slightly to ease the pressure on his stomach. With my right hand, I began to rhythmically, firmly pat his back.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Not a frantic patting. A slow, steady, deep rhythm. The exact tempo of a resting human heart.
Then, I began to hum.
It wasn't a song with words. It was a low, vibrational hum that started deep in my throat, a sound my own mother used to make when the thunderstorms rolled over our old house in Chicago.
The billionaire watched me, his posture rigid.
For the first ten seconds, the baby fought me. He arched his back, screaming louder, his tiny nails scratching against my jacket.
I didn't stop. I swayed, just an inch to the left, an inch to the right.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Thirty seconds passed.
The senator lowered his Wall Street Journal completely. The actress stopped sighing.
At the forty-five-second mark, the baby's screams hitched.
He gasped, a wet, shuddering breath, and his rigid little body suddenly went limp against me.
He turned his head, pressing his cheek deeper into my chest, searching for the source of the vibration. He found it.
One minute and twenty seconds after I took him, the impossible happened.
Silence.
The deafening, absolute silence of a first-class cabin holding its collective breath.
The baby let out one final, soft sigh, his eyes fluttering shut. His tiny fist, previously balled in rage, relaxed and curled around the frayed fabric of my collar.
He was asleep.
I kept swaying. I knew better than to stop. If you stop the heartbeat before they hit deep sleep, they wake up angrier than before.
I looked up. The powerful man in seat 2A was staring at me, his mouth slightly parted, his gray eyes shining with unshed moisture he would never allow to fall.
"How?" he whispered.
"It's about the vibration," I whispered back, continuing the sway. "When they lose their mom, the silence is what scares them the most. You have to fill the silence with something they remember."
The security guard, a mountain of a man, actually wiped his eye, pretending to adjust his earpiece.
"I'm Alexander," the man said, his voice stripped of all its previous intimidation. "Alexander Sterling. This is Leo."
"I'm Lily," I replied.
Alexander gestured for me to sit in the empty, luxurious seat next to him—seat 2B.
I shook my head. "I can't. My sister is back there. She might wake up."
"Marcus," Alexander commanded softly without looking away from me.
The giant security guard nodded, slipped through the curtain into premium economy, and returned a minute later carrying three-year-old Maya, still fast asleep, clutching her rabbit.
Marcus gently placed Maya into the oversized plush seat of 2B, buckling her in with surprising tenderness.
"Sit," Alexander instructed me, pointing to the edge of his own spacious footrest. "Please. Don't stop."
I sat cautiously, Leo still pinned to my chest, my hand still tapping that steady, life-saving rhythm.
For the next two hours over the Atlantic Ocean, the most powerful man on the plane watched a ten-year-old runaway soothe his broken world.
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And I began to realize that my €274 and my distant cousin in Rome were no longer my biggest concerns.
Because Alexander Sterling was a man who noticed things, too. And he was already looking at my bruised wrists and the cheap, oversized clothes I had dressed Maya in to hide her own bruises.
