Single Dad's Surprise (Wilder Brothers #1)

by Lisa Levine

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask her,” she said.

  I texted a quick response to ask when she thought she might return home, and I held my breath as I waited for the answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  Poppy started to fly into hysterics, and I was just too drained to deal with it. I sat down at the table in a sort of quiet numbness as Poppy started to cry and demand that we go get Annika and bring her back. But I knew in my heart that I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t force Annika back into this crazy situation. It wasn’t fair of me to do. Her whole life had been turned upside down more than once for us, and now my past with Maleah had affected her friends and family as she watched her personal life be destroyed by a trashy, fake picture.

  “Poppy, listen to me,” I said as I tried to get her to stop whipping her bear around in the air. If he weren’t made of just stuffing, he would have definitely gotten dizzy and thrown up by now. “I can’t force Annika to come back.”

  “Why would you need to force her?” she cried. “She loves us—you and me. She wants to come back. You just have to go get her to show her that we want her.”

  “Baby, I know that’s how it works in the movies, but that’s not always the way it works in real life,” I said to her. In fact, that’s never the way it works in real life.

  “That’s not true. We need to go get her, Dad, right now!”

  “We’re not going to go get her, Poppy. If she wants to come back, she will. In the meantime, we need to find another nanny.”

  “What?” The look on Poppy’s face was the angriest and most shocked I think I’d ever seen on her. “You can’t get a new nanny! I already have Annika!”

  “Poppy, I need there to be someone to take you and pick you up from school and be with you until I get home from work. I’m finally getting caught up now, and I signed a bunch of new clients that I have to be at the office to meet with. Lucie can handle things at work for today, but I have to go to the office on time tomorrow, and you have to get to school. Maybe I’ll call back one of the other nannies that I already interviewed.”

  “No! I hated them,” Poppy said with a seriously angry pout marring her lips.

  “Well, then I’ll need to place a new ad. Or call the ones that I never interviewed. You can help me with that today since we’re both staying home, okay? Don’t forget that we’re a team.”

  Poppy stared at me in disbelief. She clenched her bear in her hand and stomped away toward the staircase. Then she turned around and shouted at me over her shoulder.

  “Annika was part of our team, too,” she said.

  I had planned to spend the day with Poppy, but since she had barricaded herself in her room, I guessed I was on my own. I called back a few of the other nannies who had been on my list before, and I hadn’t interviewed since I’d had hired Annika. A couple of them agreed to come to an interview today and were still interested in the position. One of them seemed like she would do an okay job, so I asked if she could start tomorrow, and by some small stroke of luck, she could.

  Poppy would be furious and probably not speak to me all week. She would also give this new girl a run for her money, and hopefully, the girl wouldn’t quit before I figured out a more long term solution. Even with that logistic out of the way, though, all I could think about was Annika. I didn’t want to admit to the feelings that I had, the ones that I kept pushing deeper and deeper down so that they wouldn’t accidentally rise up my throat and find their way out of my mouth in word form. I wouldn’t say those words to anyone, not again. But the more I tried not to think about it, and the more I tried not to think about her, the more I knew that the feelings were real. It was exactly because of those feelings that I couldn’t force her to come back into our messed up situation.

  I sent one last text to Annika.

  “I understand if you don’t want to return. You did much more than the job ever required and much more than you knew you would be walking into when you accepted the position. Because of that, I have re-activated your apartment lease and paid for the year of rent upfront. I have deposited the year’s salary for the position into your bank account via the direct deposit information that you had given me.

  “Even though it wasn’t a year, it’s felt like an eternity, and you earned every cent of it. Oh, and also, the silver BMW you used to drive Poppy to school is being delivered to your apartment tomorrow. I just don’t have a need for it anymore.”

  I clicked send and waited while I stared at the blank screen. Poppy might have been right. Maybe Annika was just waiting for me to run to her and tell her how much we needed her, and then she would come back happily. But the simple texted reply that she sent made me think that was not the case at all. She wasn’t planning on coming back.

  “Thank you.”

  And that was the end of that. As much as I had tried not to, I had fallen for someone and she was gone. Poppy was beside herself, and I had allowed it to happen. I had allowed her to get close to Annika, and the result of her disappointment and grief over losing yet another person she cared about would be entirely my fault.

  The new nanny started the next day. Poppy, of course, hated her and tried to do everything she could to get the woman to quit on the spot. She pleaded with me some more to go and get Annika, but that just wasn’t an option, even though my each and every thought was haunted by her. Things seemed to be quiet and distant at the house, and it felt strange not having Annika here. Her room was still full of her things that I had texted and told her I would have sent to her by movers later in the week. I could have had the things sent now, but I was having a bit of trouble with how final it felt.

  I think that Poppy could see that I was about as unhappy as she was, and that was why she had stopped having constant meltdown arguments with me about fetching Annika and bringing her home. Instead, she gave me more hugs than usual and talked to me about some of the things that they were doing at school, which she never usually did. I think she was trying to keep us both distracted before one or the other of us ended up breaking.

  “You don’t look so great,” Lucie said on a day that I had shown up late to the office.

  “Gee, thanks,” I said sarcastically.

  “I mean physically, you look fine, but un-physically you look like shit,” she continued.

  “Un-physically?” I said. “What does that even mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  I stood there staring at Lucie while I held my coffee to my lips and shrugged.

  “You fell in love with the nanny, and now you’re too pig-headed to go tell her that and get her back.”

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  “Have you been conferring with Poppy?” I joked. “Because you now sound exactly like my eight-year-old.

  “Well, Poppy seems to be the more intelligent of the two of you.” Lucie was always one to call it like it is. That was something that I always respected her for.

  She was right, and I knew it, but that didn’t mean I had to admit to it. I went about business as usual, and Poppy tried to do the same.

  It wasn’t until I got a phone call from Poppy’s school that things changed from bad to worse.

  “What do you mean she isn’t there?” I asked as I had a flashback to Maleah’s phone call from the playground, telling me that they had lost my daughter.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilder, but it seems that Poppy has managed to somehow sneak out of school and off of the campus. It’s unprecedented, and we will definitely be looking into our issues of campus security. But at this point in time, we have had faculty searching the area for Poppy and have been unable to find her. Perhaps it is best to involve the local authorities now.”

  My head was spinning as Lucie stood in the doorway, listening to the conversation over the speakerphone. She picked up my keys off the desk to hand to me and grabbed her phone to start rescheduling my meetings again.

  “Mr. Wilder?” the voice of the school personnel on the phone said when I di
dn’t respond. I hung up the phone and looked at Lucie.

  “I know where she is,” I said. “I know where Poppy went.”

  When I got into my car, I dialed the nanny at the house to let her know that she was free to leave for the day. This one wasn’t a live-in. I hadn’t even moved Annika’s stuff out of the house yet. This woman was just a nine-to-five nanny during my work hours, and since Poppy wasn’t at school for her to pick up, I had no need for her to stay today. As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang through my car speakers again. This time it was Lucie.

  “Hey,” she said. “I know you’re driving, but I needed to talk to you.”

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  Lucie never called unless something was wrong; she usually just sent a text. “I know you listened to my advice about this whole nanny thing, to begin with, and I know you probably think that the whole thing has blown up in your face. But I don’t think it has.”

  “Lucie, what are you talking about?”

  “Just listen; if you’re headed to where I think you are, then I think you really need to consider what I told you before. Think about the nanny.”

  I had no idea what Lucie was trying to get at. I was thinking about Annika. I hadn’t stopped thinking about her for a single damn minute. Another call was trying to come through.

  “Lucie, I have to go. Poppy’s school is trying to call again.”

  “Okay, drive safe,” she said. “And think about it.”

  About what?

  I felt like there was a circus raging inside my head.

  “Hello, Mr. Wilder? I think we may have gotten disconnected earlier. The school is preparing to call the police in order to report Poppy’s disappearance from the school campus. We just need to get a few pieces of pertinent information from you first to make the call.”

  “You don’t need to involve the police,” I said. “Poppy isn’t missing; I know where she went.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful! So you’ve found her then?”

  “I’m on my way to go pick her up right now.”

  “Great news! Where did she go?”

  “To her nanny’s.”

  I hung up the call and tried to focus on the drive, but focusing was nearly impossible at this point. How could Poppy have been so reckless? There were a million things that could have happened to her as soon as she stepped foot off of that campus. Speaking of which, I needed to make sure she was okay. I reached for my phone to send a text message, but before I even had the first two words typed, a message came through from Annika.

  “She’s here. Poppy is here with me, and she is safe.”

  I breathed in a huge sigh of relief as a million thoughts ran through my head.

  “Thank you. On my way.” I texted back.

  Poppy had been through so much already, and I knew that she didn’t like the new nanny. I knew that she missed Annika. But to leave school and travel across the city all by herself with no directions and no money and be able to find her way all the way to Annika’s doorstep…well, that was really dangerous and really important. I was mad at her for doing something so risky, but I was also grateful to her for doing something that I didn’t have the balls to do.

  Poppy knew that she needed Annika, and I think she knew that we both needed her. When I had failed to listen to her, she decided to take matters into her own hands and go off to find Annika by herself and bring her back.

  Chapter Seventeen (Annika)

  I hadn’t expected a knock at my door. No one even knew that I had moved back into my apartment yet, not even my dad.

  My first thought was that it was some scummy second-rate reporter that was coming to interview me about the sex picture scandal. My second thought was that my father had somehow found out that I had moved back into my apartment and had come to lecture me until my eardrums burst. I wasn’t sure which of those two options I preferred because they were both so horrible.

  I had been sitting on the floor of my apartment—since there was no furniture here now—wrapped up in a blanket and drinking hot tea out of the one cup I had with me. When I left, I had taken only a bag with a few things and a blanket in my arms. So I sat on the floor of my apartment surrounded by pretty much nothing aside from my own feelings. Jake had asked me when I wanted the movers to deliver the rest of my stuff, but I hadn’t answered him back yet, and he hadn’t asked again. I got the feeling that we were both kind of stalling at the finality of the whole thing. Sleeping on the floor with only a blanket and no pillow wasn’t comfortable at all, but neither was the thought of not ever waking up in Jake’s arms again or never falling asleep with Poppy and Bear curled next to my side.

  I stood up stiffly from the floor and went to open the door. I wished I had one of those little peepholes or at least a window near the door so that I could see who it was before I opened it and regretted the decision entirely.

  “Poppy!” I said in complete shock when I saw her and her bear standing on my doorstep in her school uniform. “Poppy, what are you doing here?”

  She reached up and wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed me in a big hug. I lifted her up and carried her inside. She looked tired and was breathing heavily as if she had just run a marathon.

  “Where is your dad?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably at work. He doesn’t know that I came here.”

  “What do you mean he doesn’t know? How did you get here?”

  “I left school to come to find you and bring you back,” she said as she looked at me with tears in her eyes.”

  I was dumbfounded. Poppy had left her school, all by herself, bringing only her stuffed bear in her hands, and had somehow made it all the way to my apartment.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “The school had your address on my contact form. I asked to go to the bathroom and then snuck up to the office and looked at my file. I wrote it down on my hand, see?”

  She held up her hand, and there scribbled on her palm was the correct address to my apartment.

  “After I left the school, I went to stand at the bus station that we pass on the way to school each day, and I met a nice lady there who told me how to get here. She paid for my bus ticket too, after I told her that I was lost and was just trying to get home. I sat and talked with her on the ride, and she told me about her cats.”

  “Poppy, what you did was very dangerous,” I said as I hugged her close and cried. I was so happy to see her and even happier that she hadn’t gotten hurt on this foolish venture. “Why in the world would you have done this?”

  “I missed you,” Poppy said as she started to cry. “And I want you to come home.”

  “Oh, Poppy,” I said as I took her to sit down on the blanket that was spread over the floor with me. “That decision isn’t up to you, I’m afraid. That decision is up to your dad and me.”

  “Why did you leave?” she asked. It looked like Bear was giving me quite an inquisitive look, too, with his black, beady, button-eyes.

  “I just needed some time to think about things.”

  “So you’re coming back then?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to. I wasn’t even planning on staying for more than a year, and now I think that it might be making things worse for you and your dad if I stay. I think it might be best for me just to leave and let you and your dad find a new nanny. There are plenty of other really great nannies out there.”

  “But I don’t want another nanny. I want you! And dad doesn’t want another nanny, either. He likes you. He wants you to come back, too.”

  “Did he say that to you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said with a frown. “But I can see that he does. He is sad all the time now, and he’s just too stubborn to come here and tell you that he wants you to come home. You’re both too stubborn. You both want to stay together, and you’re both being difficult.”

  I laughed. Poppy was right; sometimes, adults were much more work
than children. But this was a complicated situation, and even if Poppy were right about it, it wasn’t the kind of situation that a simplistic and childlike solution would solve, unfortunately.

  “I need to let your dad know that you’re here,” I said as I reached for my phone.

  “No! He’ll come to get me and make me go home. I don’t want to go back home without you.”

  “I have to call him. He’s probably worried sick about you.”

  After I texted Jake, he responded that he was on his way.

  Poppy looked around the room and spotted my bag in the corner. She picked it up and then started to grab the few things that I had around the apartment and shove them into the bag.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Packing your stuff so that you can come home.”

  “Poppy—”

  “Annika, please come home.” Poppy stopped to look at me with Bear dangling from one hand and my bag dangling from the other.

  I tried to explain to her once again why it just wasn’t going to work out. As much as I cared about Poppy and Jake, we came from different worlds that weren’t going to be able to merge together without a whole lot of struggle that none of us deserved to go through. I reminded her that her dad loves her so much and reassured her that things with her mom would someday get better. And I reminded her that I was just the nanny, and that wasn’t something that was supposed to last. She didn’t seem to believe much of anything that I said, though, and honestly, I wasn’t sure how much I believed it myself.

  We were sitting on the floor in a big hug with Bear in the middle of us and tears streaming down both of her cheeks when the door to my apartment flung open. I guess that in my surprise to see Poppy, I had forgotten to lock it back up again.

  Jake stood in the doorway, staring at the both of us sitting on the floor in tears. He stood there looking like a handsome and motionless hero that had made it to the end of his epic journey and didn’t know what to do next. I looked up at him and gave a smile between my tears to show him that I was glad Poppy was safe and sound, too. As soon as Poppy looked up and saw him there, she threw her arms around my shoulders and tightened her grip.