Chapter 85: The First Bottle Battle
The silence of the nursery was a fragile thing. It lasted maybe seven minutes.
Amber felt it fray at the edges first, a pre-storm static in the air. Then Sincere let out a guttural, hungry cry that seemed to vibrate up through the floorboards. Sidnee startled, her own mouth forming a tiny, silent ‘O’ before the sound arrived—a higher, more insistent wail.
The spell was broken.
“Shift change,” Kash murmured, pushing himself up from the floor with a soft groan. He scooped Sincere up, the baby’s cries muffled against his shoulder. “I’ve got the bottle warmer primed.”
Amber lifted Sidnee, the baby’s body tense with the effort of crying. “Shhh, I know, I know. Mama’s here.” The words were automatic, a mantra. Her own body responded to the cries with a deep, pulling ache, milk letting down in a warm, uncomfortable rush. She followed Kash into the kitchen, the domain of stainless steel and soft morning light now repurposed as a command center. Pre-measured bottles of formula stood in a neat line on the counter next to the industrial warmer. The breast pump, its parts sterilized and gleaming, sat beside it like a piece of forgotten medical equipment.
“Let me try with her,” Kash said, nodding to Sidnee as he expertly poured formula for Sincere. “You pump. We’ll tag-team it.”
Amber handed Sidnee over, her arms feeling oddly light without the weight. She settled at the kitchen island, assembling the flanges and bottles of the pump with a efficiency born of brutal repetition. The electric hum clicked on, a sterile, rhythmic substitute for the soft suck of a baby. She watched Kash.
He cradled Sidnee in the crook of his arm, his large hand dwarfing the tiny bottle. He offered the nipple. Sidnee latched eagerly, her brow furrowed in concentration, and for three steady pulls, it worked. Then she sputtered, her little body arching away from the bottle as if it had offended her. Milk trickled down her chin. A sharp, frustrated wail tore from her throat.
“Hey, no, sweet girl, it’s okay,” Kash murmured, repositioning her, tilting the bottle. He tried again. Sidnee turned her head, her mouth clamping shut, her cries growing more frantic, her face a mottled red.
Amber saw the panic flicker across his face—a momentary loss of the unflappable calm he wore like armor. It was there in the tightness around his eyes, the slight hesitation in his hands. He was a genius at navigating servers and code, but this tiny, furious human presented a problem his logic couldn’t parse.
“Switch,” Amber said, her voice cutting through the noise. She twisted the pump dial to off, the sudden silence loud. Her breasts felt heavy, uncomfortably full. “Give her to me. You take him.”
They executed the exchange in the middle of the gleaming kitchen, a clumsy ballet of tangled limbs and screaming infants. Kash took Sincere, who was sucking his bottle with a determined, noisy fervor. Amber carried Sidnee to the deep, upholstered nursing chair they’d shoved into the corner by the window.
She settled into the cushion, unclipped her nursing bra with one hand, and guided Sidnee to her breast. The baby’s head bobbed, frantic, angry. Then, as her lips brushed skin, instinct took over. She latched. Deeply, properly.
The change was instantaneous. The tension melted from Sidnee’s tiny frame. Her clenched fists unfurled, one little hand coming up to rest, splayed, against Amber’s chest. The only sounds were the soft, rhythmic suck-swallow-breath pattern and Sincere’s contented grunts from across the room.
Relief, warm and potent, flooded Amber’s veins, washing away the sharp edge of anxiety. She leaned her head back against the chair, closing her eyes for a second. This, her body knew how to do. This was a language written in her bones.
She heard Kash’s soft footsteps. He knelt beside the chair, Sincere asleep against his shoulder, milk-drunk and serene. Kash’s eyes were on Sidnee, on the way her cheek pulsed with each swallow. He reached out, not touching them, just resting his hand on the arm of the chair.
“You’re a natural,” he whispered, his voice rough.
Amber opened her eyes, meeting his gaze. A tired smile touched her lips. “She just knows what she wants. And it’s not the expensive formula.”
“Can’t blame her.” He leaned in, kissing her temple, his lips lingering against her skin. She could smell the faint spice of his cologne, the soap on his skin, the milky sweetness of the baby on his shoulder. It was a cocktail of their life now. “You good?”
She nodded, the knot in her chest loosening another degree. “Yeah. For this minute, I’m good.”
They stayed like that, a tableau of quiet triumph in the sunlit kitchen. The world outside—the buzzing phone in the nursery, the unresolved disaster of the salon, the looming grandeur of the half-built manor—receded. There was only this anchored moment: the weight of a feeding child, the solid warmth of her husband beside her, the simple, monumental act of sustaining a life.
Sidnee finished, her mouth going slack, her body boneless with sleep. Amber shifted her to a shoulder, patting a soft burp into the quiet. Kash laid Sincere down in the bassinet they’d moved into the kitchen. He came back and took Sidnee from her, his movements sure now, his confidence returned. He cradled her against his chest, his hand covering her entire back.
“Go,” he said, nodding toward the bedroom. “You got maybe forty-five minutes. Take them.”
Amber didn’t need telling twice. Her body felt like wet sand. She stood, her legs stiff, and padded down the hall to their bedroom. The bed, unmade and inviting, was a siren’s call. She fell into it face first, the cool sheets a shock against her skin. Sleep pulled her under before her head fully settled on the pillow.
It was a shallow, frantic sleep, haunted by the ghost of a crying baby. Her body jerked awake every ten minutes, ears straining. Silence. Each time, the relief was a drug, pulling her back down.
The fourth time she jolted awake, it wasn’t a dream. It was a vibration against her hip. Her phone, on the mattress beside her. The screen glowed: LACEY.
Amber groaned, pressing her face deeper into the pillow. She let it go to voicemail. It buzzed again immediately. Then a text pinged.
Lacey: The dehumidifiers quit. Restoration company says it’s an electrical issue with the circuit. Building management is involved. They’re saying it’s your equipment that overloaded it.
The last cobwebs of sleep evaporated. Amber sat up, her heart doing a hard, unpleasant thump against her ribs. She called.
“Tell me everything,” she said, her voice sleep-raspy but clear.
Lacey’s words tumbled out, stressed and fast. The growl of industrial equipment had blown a circuit unique to her suite. The building’s electrician was booked. The stagnant water was sitting there, re-soaking everything. The restoration foreman was threatening to leave, to bill her for the idle time.
“They’re saying it could be a two-day wait for a fix, Amber. Two days. In this heat? That drywall is already toast. The smell…”
Amber saw it. The beautiful, blinged-out station 2, the custom mural wall, the shelving units she’d sourced from Italy—all of it swelling, warping, growing a fine, fuzzy skin of mold. Her empire, dissolving from the inside out.
“Get the foreman on the phone,” she said, swinging her legs out of bed. “Right now.”
“He’s right here.”
A moment later, a deep, tired male voice came on the line. “Mrs. King. Not a good situation. My crew’s on the clock, and we can’t run so much as a fan. Liability says we can’t even be in there with the standing water and no air circulation.”
Amber walked to the window, looking out at the flawless blue sky. “What’s the fix? Specifically.”
“An electrician needs to run a dedicated, heavier-gauge line from the main panel to that circuit. It’s old building wiring. It was never meant for this load.”
“How long to do it?”
“If you can get an electrician here today? Four, five hours. Then we’re back in business. But good luck finding one on a Friday. And the building management has to approve any work on their infrastructure.”
A five-hour job. A simple line in a wall. Holding her entire livelihood hostage. The frustration was a physical taste, metallic and sour, in the back of her throat.
“Give me your crew’s idle rate,” she said, her mind clicking over, assessing, triaging. “I’ll pay it to keep them on standby. Get me the contact for the building’s head of facilities. Right now.”
She ended the call with the foreman and immediately dialed the number Lacey texted her. She got voicemail. She left a blunt, polite message detailing the emergency and the needed approval, her voice steadier than she felt.
Then she scrolled through her contacts. She didn’t call electricians. She called Mateo, the general contractor for the new house. He answered on the second ring.
“Mateo. I have a five-hour electrical job in uptown. A dedicated line. I need your best guy, and I need him there in an hour. I will pay triple his day rate, plus a completion bonus. Can you make that happen?”
Mateo didn’t hesitate. “For you, Mrs. King? I’ll send my brother. He’s licensed, fast, and doesn’t mind getting dirty. Text me the address and who needs to let him in.”
A sliver of hope, hard and sharp. “Thank you. I owe you.”
“Just send more clients our way when that palace is finished,” he said, laughing.
She coordinated it all from the bedroom window: texting Lacey, relaying Mateo’s brother’s number, calling the facilities head again. This time, he answered. She navigated the bureaucracy with a mix of charm, implied legal threat, and the simple, undeniable leverage of promising to cover all costs and indemnify the building. He agreed to meet the electrician in forty minutes.
When she finally put the phone down, her hands were trembling. The adrenaline crash left her feeling hollowed out. She looked at her reflection in the dark window glass—a woman in rumpled sleep shorts, hair wild, eyes shadowed, standing in a silent multi-million dollar apartment while fighting a war over mildewing drywall.
She walked back to the kitchen. Kash was at the island, Sidnee asleep in a wearable cloth carrier on his chest while he chopped vegetables with quiet precision for a soup. The scene was so domestic, so calm, it felt like a separate reality.
“The salon’s electrical grid just tried to mutiny,” she said, her voice flat.
He didn’t look up from the onions. “Did you put it down?”
“I called in a mercenary. Costing me a fortune.”
“Good.” He set the knife down, wiped his hands on a towel, and looked at her. “That’s what the fortune is for. To solve the problems so you don’t have to carry them.”
The simplicity of his statement disarmed her. She walked over, leaning her forehead against his shoulder blade, between Sidnee’s curled feet. She breathed him in. “I just want to do nails. I just want to feed my babies. Why is there always a wall of fire in between?”
He turned, wrapping his arms around her, enveloping both her and Sidnee in a quiet embrace. “Because you’re building something worth protecting. Fires tend to show up for that.” He kissed her hair. “The electrician’s there?”
“He will be.”
“Then it’s handled. For now.” He pulled back slightly, looking down at her. “Sincere’s down. She’s down. You have maybe twenty more minutes. Go shower. Wash the panic off.”
In the steam of the shower, the events of the morning swirled down the drain with the soap. The water was scalding, a baptism back into her own skin. She washed her hair, careful of her new nails, the cobalt blue and gold foil now chipped at the edges from assembling pump parts and gripping phones too tightly. Armor, showing its first dents.
When she emerged, wrapped in a towel, the apartment was still quiet. She could hear the soft, gurgling snores of Sincere from the nursery monitor on the vanity. She moisturised, put on clean, soft clothes. She felt like a photocopy of a person, but a cleaner one.
She padded back to the kitchen. Kash was stirring the soup, the rich smell of garlic and thyme filling the air. Sidnee was now asleep in the bassinet at his feet.
“Electrician’s in,” he said, nodding to her phone on the counter where a text from Lacey glowed. He’s here. Building guy is here. They’re already arguing about conduit. But they’re here.
Amber picked up the phone. She typed a response. Let them argue. Just get the line run.
She put the phone down, screen facing the marble. She looked at Kash, then at the two sleeping infants, then at the pot of soup simmering on the stove. The fragile, defended peace of the morning was gone, replaced by a quieter, more durable stillness—the kind that comes after the first wave has been survived, when you’re just waiting for the next one to crest.
She walked over to the bassinet. Sidnee’s lips were parted, her breaths even. Amber touched the back of one finger to the baby’s cheek, softer than anything she’d ever known.
“Okay, Murphy,” she whispered, too low for anyone else to hear. “You got a point on the board. But the game’s long.”
From the nursery monitor, a soft, snuffling sigh echoed. Then, silence. The line was holding. For now.
For now.
The afternoon dissolved into the granular, repetitive focus of newborn care. There were bottles to wash, diapers to change, tiny clothes to fold into impossibly small squares. The electrician called twice with questions; Lacey texted updates every thirty minutes. Amber learned to hold Sidnee in the crook of her neck while typing responses with her thumbs, her body a bridge between two competing necessities.
Kash handled the rest. He moved through the space like a calm, efficient tide, cleaning, organizing, ordering groceries that appeared at their door in insulated bags. He didn’t ask for lists or make suggestions. He simply observed the gaps—the dwindling diapers, the empty coffee canister—and filled them.
By seven that evening, a fragile routine had been cobbled together. Both babies were fed, bathed in the plastic tub on the kitchen counter, and swaddled into what they hoped were sleep-ready burritos. The silence, when it finally settled after the last grizzled sigh from the nursery monitor, felt dense and surprising.
“Don’t move,” Kash murmured from the sofa where he’d collapsed beside her. “You’ll wake the universe.”
Amber let out a breath that trembled. “I think my spine has fused into the shape of this cushion.”
He pushed himself up, his movements deliberately slow and quiet. “Stay. I’ll be right back.”
She listened to him move through the apartment, the soft click of cupboard doors, the rustle of paper. She didn’t have the energy to wonder. Her gaze was fixed on the monitor screen, watching the two grainy, still forms in their cribs. She counted Sidnee’s breaths until the numbers blurred.
A new scent cut through the apartment’s background notes of baby powder and lemon cleaner. Garlic. Basil. The rich, oily fragrance of really good pizza dough. Her stomach clenched, a sharp, primal pang of hunger she’d been ignoring for hours.
Kash reappeared, carrying a large cardboard box stamped with the familiar logo of Portofino’s. He set it on the coffee table, then brought over two plates, cutlery, napkins. From the wine fridge, he retrieved a bottle of her favorite peach Moscato, filling her favorite crystal glass—a wide-bowled thing that caught the light—to the brim.
“What’s all this?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“It’s seven-thirteen p.m.,” he said, sitting beside her and popping the lid off the box. The aroma intensified: wild mushroom ravioli, a caprese salad, hunks of focaccia still steaming. “The first window of opportunity. No guarantees it won’t close in five minutes.”
He served her, a generous portion of ravioli glistening with sage butter. She took a bite, and the flavors exploded, rich and decadent. A small, involuntary sound of pleasure escaped her. Kash watched her eat for a moment, a satisfied look on his face, before fixing his own plate.
They ate in the quiet, the monitor’s soft static their background music. It was the first real meal she’d had sitting down in weeks.
“Mateo’s brother saved the day,” Kash said, twirling pasta. “The line is run. The dehumidifiers are back online, louder than ever, apparently.”
“Good,” Amber said around a mouthful of bread. The relief was a tangible thing, allowing her shoulders to drop an inch. “The building manager sent a snippy email about permanent infrastructure modifications. I forwarded it to our lawyer.”
“See? Handled.” He took a sip of his water. “We should start thinking about the manor. The interior design. That place is a blank slate. It needs… a soul. Your soul.”
The idea was daunting, but in a pleasant, distant way. “I keep thinking about that blue glass. We could pull that color through. Deep, moody blues in the library. Maybe a peach accent wall in the morning room, like this wine.” She swirled the golden liquid in her glass. “A home, not a showroom.”
“Exactly. A home where…” He trailed off as her phone, lying face-down on the sofa between them, buzzed sharply.
The flinch went through her whole body. Kash saw it, the brief flicker of tension that tightened her jaw before she even moved.
She picked it up. A text from Meisha, her most reliable nail tech and the de facto floor manager at the SouthPark location.
Meisha: Hey boss. Sorry to bug. Client at 8 a.m. tomorrow is Mrs. Henley. She’s asking if you can personally do her anniversary set. Offered to triple the rate. Also, the toilet in the back bathroom is making a whistling sound. Like a ghost is living in it. Plumber on Monday?
The details were mundane, but together they formed a chain, thin and strong, tethering her back to that other world. The ghost-whistle toilet, the demanding Mrs. Henley, the endless micro-decisions. Amber’s thumb hovered over the screen, her appetite suddenly dulled.
Kash watched her face. He didn’t ask. He simply set his plate aside, wiped his hands on a napkin, and reached for a large, cream-colored envelope on the shelf beneath the coffee table. He placed it in her lap.
“Open it,” he said, his voice low.
“Kash, if this is more contractor estimates for the manor, I can’t right now…”
“Just open it.”
She set her phone down, screen still glowing with Meisha’s words. She slid a finger under the flap and pulled out a single sheet of heavy linen paper. It was an account summary from a private bank. The account name read: Amber Nicole King, Sole Proprietor.
Her eyes scanned down to the balance.
Her breath stopped. The numbers seemed to swim, then align. She counted the zeros twice, her heart pounding in her ears. Twenty million dollars.
She looked at Kash, her mouth slightly open. No words came.
“It’s a business account,” he said, his gaze steady on hers. “In your name. For your salons.”
“This is… this is too much,” she finally managed, the paper trembling in her hand.
“It’s pennies,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. A simple, factual statement. “To me, it is. To you, right now, it should be peace. That’s all it’s for. To buy you peace.”
He leaned forward, taking her free hand in his. His touch was warm, grounding. “Use it. Hire someone you trust—Meisha, probably—to be your COO. Pay her whatever it takes. Have her run everything. The ghost toilets, the schedule, the ordering, the hiring. Everything. She just brings the big, fun, creative decisions to you for approval. The vision stuff. The stuff you love.”
Amber stared at him, the magnitude of the offer unfolding in layers. It wasn’t a gift; it was a strategic extraction.
“You want me to… step back,” she whispered.
“I want you to be free,” he corrected softly. “So you can be here. For them. For you. For as long as you want. A year, five years, until they start school. However long it takes for you to not flinch when your phone buzzes.”
He nodded toward the nursery monitor, where their children slept. “Your business can flourish without you being on the front line. It’s a testament to what you built that it can. This just lets you… breathe. And design our home. And be their mom. Without a divided heart.”
Amber looked from the staggering number on the page to his earnest face, then to the dark screen of her phone. The ghost-whistle toilet, Mrs. Henley’s triple rate, the flooded floor, the dry rot—they all receded, their screams muffled by the profound quiet of financial solution. It felt like being handed a parachute after months in freefall.
A single, hot tear traced a path down her cheek, followed by another. Not from sadness, but from the sheer, overwhelming relief of a weight being lifted—a weight she hadn’t fully acknowledged she was carrying alone.
She looked at the account summary again, then carefully folded it and slid it back into the envelope. She placed it on the table, next to her half-finished glass of peach wine.
Then she turned to him, her wet eyes searching his. “You’re sure?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “Talk to Meisha tomorrow. Make her an offer she can’t refuse.”
From the nursery monitor, a soft, sleepy coo echoed, followed by the rustle of a swaddle. A normal sound. A sound she could now just hear, without already calculating her response.
Amber picked up her phone. She typed a reply to Meisha, her new blue-and-gold nails tapping a sure, decisive rhythm on the glass.
Amber: Tell Mrs. Henley I’m on maternity leave, but Elena will do a stunning job. Schedule the plumber. And Meisha… let’s have lunch next week. I have a proposition for you. A big one.
She sent it. She put the phone down, this time turning it completely over, hiding its face.
She picked up her wine glass, took a long, slow sip, and let her head fall back against the cushion. The silence in the room was no longer fragile. It was spacious. It was hers.
“Okay,” she said to the ceiling, to Kash, to the future unfolding quietly in the next room. “Okay.”