He looks lonely.
And now he has a baby he didn't know existed until yesterday.
I watch a clip from last month's game. He moves on the ice as if the surface belongs to him—the kind of grace that makes no sense for someone his size, handling the puck, and taking a shot that misses by inches. The commentator mentions inconsistent performance this season. The camera catches his face as he skates back to the bench.
That exhaustion again. Bone-deep. The kind you can't perform your way out of.
By the time I've finished reading everything available, I'm in the shower. By the time I'm dressed, I've organized my folder of references by date—with the CPR certification on top—because that's what I do. The last four years, documented in careful detail. A clean background check and glowing references from three families.
I know I'm good at this job.
It might be the only thing I'm still good at.
I look in the mirror, and my mother looks back at me.
The same hazel eyes, the green only visible up close. The same long, wavy auburn hair that never quite cooperates, pulled backinto a ponytail because there's no time and no point. Her small frame, short where it counts, the kind of figure that has curves but still makes people underestimate her. She was a nanny before she married my father, and she was the kind of person who walked into a room and made it feel safer without doing anything. People handed their children to her and trusted her on instinct.
I reach for my phone, and then I remember.
Two years.You'd think the reflex would have faded by now. It hasn't. The impulse to call her when something like this happens—something uncertain, something where I need to hear her voice—doesn't fade. I just have to keep running into it.
I push it down. I've gotten good at that.
This is just a job.Professional. Temporary.I will do good work here, then move on, and not let myself believe it is anything else.
I leave with enough time to sit outside the address Margaret texted me for three minutes before going in. A rental house in a decent neighborhood, a small front yard, and a mailbox sitting slightly crooked on its post. The kind of place someone lives when they haven't decided if they’re staying yet.
I check my reflection in the rearview mirror. Jeans, a thin cream knit jumper over a plain shirt, and black boots. No makeup because I never bother, and today is not the day to start. I look like someone competent and unassuming and completely fine, which is the point. What I don't look like is someone who just did the math on his salary and felt the particular low hum of knowing the number he'll pay me per week is more than I've saved in two years combined. I push that down along with everything else.
I’m professional. Capable. Trustworthy.Not someone who is barely holding it together.
The engine ticks as it cools. My car is twelve years old and makes a sound on cold starts that I've been meaning to get looked at for eight months. Parked outside this house, in this neighborhood, it feels like a neon sign. If he were to open that door and look at me, he would clock exactly what kind of person was here to save him, and some small, stupid part of me already cares.
I groan. I should just get out, ring the bell, and get it over with.
I'm still sitting here when I hear it, even through the closed windows, even through the August heat. A baby crying. And underneath it, a man's voice, rough, low, and so exhausted it does something to my throat before I've decided to let it.
"Please. Come on, Harper, please. I don't know what else to do."
I pick up my folder and get out.
This is just a job. I will not get attached.
That's what I tell myself, standing on Tyler West's doorstep while a baby screams and a man begs her to stop.
That's what I tell myself right up until I ring the bell.
4
NORA
Awoman answers the door, and for half a second, I think I have the wrong house.
She's blonde, green-eyed, her ponytail pulled back, and exhaustion is buried underneath a layer of determined warmth. Behind her, the baby's screaming is loud enough to feel in my chest.
"You must be the nanny." She raises her voice over the cries. "Thank God. Come in."
From deeper in the house, a man's voice: "The what?"