by Serena Bell
“How’s Katie doing?” Brooks asks, and I have to look away from his sympathy.
“She’s—” Fuck it. It’s too complicated to get into. “She’s doing good.”
As if to punctuate my bald-faced lie, my phone chimes with the nanny’s ring. I apologize to Brooks and Rodriguez, who wave me off, and answer the call. “Chase here.”
Celia, the nanny, says, “She’s crying again.”
For the hundredth time since Celia started two weeks ago, I wonder if I’ve screwed up by hiring her. Even though Celia gives off a Mary Poppins vibe, and even though Liv—who’s also a nanny—said she’d heard through the grapevine that Celia was good, I’m not buying it. Celia calls me every time Katie cries, asking permission to give her candy or put on TV shows—both of which I try to limit—and that just doesn’t seem right. Shouldn’t Celia be able to comfort Katie some other way? Or to distract her with a song and dance, a story, a craft project? Isn’t that what professional nannies do? And last night, when I tucked Katie into bed and asked about her day, she told me she doesn’t like Celia.
Why not, baby?
I’m not a baby. I’m a big girl.
You are a big girl. You’re my big girl. And I love you lots. Now sleep tight.
I told myself Katie wouldn’t like anyone who was trying to take her mom’s place right now. Her dislike for Celia wasn’t specific.
Now, however, guilt sandbags me. It’s bad enough to lose your mom and be saddled with a clueless dad without getting left all day with a nanny you don’t like.
“I’ll be home in fifteen minutes,” I tell Celia, exhaustion crashing down on me. The weight of Big Win and Katie’s grief and how I have no idea what to do about any of it. “Put on Frozen.”
That goddamn movie seems to be the only thing that works.
I hang up.
Brooks and Rodriguez are both eyeing me with pity. There’s no point now in trying to pretend things are okay. “She’s asking for Thea,” I tell them.
“Shit, Chase.” Brooks shakes his head.
“I’m sorry, man,” Rodro says.
I just nod. Because words aren’t my friends right now. Words haven’t been my friends at all the last month.
Brooks claps me across the shoulder.
I drive home, pull into the driveway, and jog into the house. I can hear the sounds of Frozen coming from the living room. When I go in, Katie is sitting on the couch, attention glued to Olaf’s antics.
Celia is sitting in an armchair nearby, asleep.
Shouldn’t the nanny be awake when she’s on duty?
“Thanks, C,” I say, startling her awake. “I can take it from here.”
Most nights since Celia started I’ve asked for a debrief at the end of the day, but she never gives me much. Today I don’t even bother.
“I’ll be in my room if you need me,” Celia says, and retreats, wafting past me in a cloud of the breath mints she lives on.
I thought having a nanny would make things easier, not harder. That having someone else living in the house who knew kids would help me figure things out. Make me feel a little less in over my head.
It’s not that I never spent time with Katie before. But it was a couple of hours here. An overnight there. A soccer game, a ballet recital. Thea kept Katie so busy with activities: pee-wee sports, trips, and playdates.
Thea had Katie, and Thea and Katie had their mom-and-kid friends and their ways of doing things, and whenever I tried to do anything other than be a spectator, I felt a lot like I was clomping around Thea’s delicate herb garden in hip waders. Feeding Katie the “wrong” food or letting her watch the “wrong” movies. It was maybe the only time in my life when I’ve felt that downright wrong-footed, and the few times I got in Thea’s face about it, about how maybe there wasn’t a right and wrong way, she reminded me in no uncertain terms that she’d never asked for my help.
True enough.
So now I’m figuring it all out more or less from scratch. And I’m doing okay, I’m doing, for fuck’s sake, the best I can, but—
Well, I was hoping having a professional around would help, that’s all.
I watch Katie for a moment, trying to take a breath big enough to whisk the ache out of my chest but not succeeding. Her brown eyes are red-rimmed, her face still shiny in places where the tears haven’t finished drying, her blond hair limp and damp.
I sit down next to her and pause the movie.
“Daddy,” she protests.
I give her a hug and a kiss. “Did you have a good day with Celia?”
“I don’t like Celia,” she says, craning her head as if that will make the movie start up again.
I almost just press play. But something makes me ask, “What don’t you like about Celia?”
“She smells funny.”
I’m relieved that it’s that, a quirky kid objection, and not something I need to really worry about, like, She yells or She hits or She’s mean.
“That’s just her breath mints,” I say.
“Can you start the movie again?”
I hit play. Then I go into the kitchen and pull my bottle of Dalwhinnie off the liquor shelf.
I’m midway through pouring myself two generous fingers when I happen to look up at the liquor cabinet and notice that I’m almost out of Kahlúa. Which is weird because I remember buying it right after Christmas, and I can’t remember using it since then.
A lightbulb goes on in my head.
I start pulling down other bottles.
Certain things I know for sure. I hate rye, so I’m not the one who drank the Bulleit 95 I keep shoved near the back of the cabinet for Brooks. I bought the elderberry liqueur to make chick drinks for this woman I was dating who was a sucker for them, but things petered out between us before she ever made it through my front door. So there should be almost a full bottle, not just dregs. And I swear to God there used to be a bottle of sherry in here—can’t even remember why—but it’s gone.
She smells funny, Katie said.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I gather a handful of bottles by the neck and head up the stairs, where I knock on Celia’s door. She opens it.
Confrontation doesn’t bug me. You have to have good boundaries to manage a business. But at the same time, asking your nanny of two weeks if she has been in your liquor cabinet—it’s awkward.
So I’m pretty grateful when she saves me the trouble. She takes one look at the bottles in my hand and says, “Oh, shit.”
Chapter 2
Katie answers the door.
“Hi, Livvy. I’m watching Frozen,” the world’s most adorable five-year-old proclaims proudly, pushing strands of blond hair out of her face. The strands fall back into her eyes, and I kneel to tuck them behind her ears. She needs her face washed; it’s streaked with tears and snot. I want to cry just looking at her.
“What part are you at?”
“Elsa’s ice palace. She’s singing ‘Let It Go.’ ” Katie sings a few lines, the only way five-year-old girls seem to be able to do it, at full volume.
“That’s my favorite part. Can I come in? I brought you spaghetti.” I display the brown take-out bag.
She holds the door open, and I step into the living room. Frozen is paused on the TV, and Chase is nowhere in sight.
I love Chase’s house. Maybe it’s the number of times it’s been a refuge after a really crappy date, or the fact that I’m more myself around Chase than around just about anyone else I know, but coming here always feels like finally pulling on sweats and taking off my makeup at the end of a long day. Even the house itself is super comfy. Not my style at all, or really any style—a mishmash of well-worn furniture and rugs—but the whole thing feels a lot like wrapping up in a fleece blanket and watching a good chick flick. Which—I’ve done maybe a hundred times on Chase’s armchair by now, while he watches his action movies on his own laptop on the couch a couple of feet away.
But since Katie’s mom died, Chase’s house has felt different.
Not so much like a refuge. Instead, I’m always conscious of Katie’s grief and Chase’s awkwardness around his daughter, like she’s a guest who showed up out of the blue and hasn’t given him a definite end date.
Selfishly, I miss my friend Chase as much as I think he misses his old life. I want him to smile again like he used to, thousands of watts at the slightest provocation, always ready with the jokes.
Footsteps clomp on the stairs and Celia, Katie’s nanny, descends. It takes me a moment to realize she has her suitcase in her hand.
“Oh,” she says, seeing me. An expression I can’t identify crosses her face. I feel like I’ve intruded on her privacy, even though my being here is perfectly reasonable.
“Hi, Celia.”
“Hi, Liv.”
She descends the last few steps, crosses to Katie, sets her suitcase down, hugs Katie tight, picks up the suitcase, and heads toward the open door.
My stomach tightens. It’s an uncomfortably familiar scene, and no one has to tell me what’s going on. She’s quitting, or she’s been fired.
That was me, two weeks ago—the quitting part, not the fired part. Packing my suitcase, leaving behind a perfectly good nannying job—not to mention a place to live—able only to hug my two charges but not to really say goodbye or explain why I was leaving. Of course, unless Chase is a very different guy from the one I think I know, the reasons behind my departure and hers aren’t at all the same.
“Bye,” Celia whispers—so quietly I don’t think Katie hears her—and goes out the door.
Chase comes down the stairs behind her, and I tip my head in the direction of the closing door, eyebrow raised in question.
He puts a finger to his lips, picks up the Frozen remote, and starts the movie. Like a robot, Katie turns her attention back to the unfurling grandeur of Elsa’s ice palace. Chase beckons me to follow him into the kitchen.
“What happened?” I ask him, voice low.
He brushes his hand through his reddish-brown hair, making it all stand on end. Chase has that kind of not-quite-curly hair that won’t behave, but because he’s a guy, no one gives a shit. When he rumples it and it’s all over the place, he just looks hot. I say that objectively, as an appreciative observer of male beauty, not because I personally crush on Chase. I know most people don’t think men and women can be friends—for the record, I was one of them until I met Chase—but he really has become one of my closest friends. It helps that both of us know, and have known from the very beginning, that we are utterly, completely, one hundred percent incompatible romantically.
“She was helping herself to my liquor cabinet.” He points to a collection of empty and mostly empty bottles on the counter.
The expression I saw on Celia’s face earlier suddenly makes sense. It was shame.
“Oh, shit, Chase, I’m so sorry. And I’m the one who told you she was good.”
“Plenty of other references backed you up. And no way you coulda known.” He sighs. “I told her I thought she needed help. I offered to help her find help—but you know—she said she was fine. She didn’t want to talk about it.”
He reaches for a glass of amber liquid on the counter and sips it. “You want some wine?”
“Sure.”
Chase never drinks wine, but he keeps it around for me, which is just one of the many reasons he’s a good friend. He pours me a generous amount in a juice glass—bachelor style—and hands it over. “Cheers,” he says, tapping my glass with his, but he doesn’t sound particularly cheery. There are circles under his light brown eyes. Again, purely objectively speaking, Chase has beautiful eyes, flecked with darker brown, gold, and green, fringed with long eyelashes. I’d love to see the light come back into them again.
It’s not his own grief. Pretty sure there’s been nothing between him and Katie’s mom for years. But that doesn’t mean any of this is easy. He went from being his own man to full-time fatherhood in a flash, and you can see the weight of all the responsibility clearly etched on his face and even in the slight slump of his shoulders. Now, on top of the rest of it, he’s down a nanny.
And even though Chase clearly doesn’t hold me responsible for the Celia fiasco, I’m feeling guilty for having vouched for her. “Hey. If you need me to, I could watch Katie tomorrow.”
“I thought you had a job.”
“Had being the operative word.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“I had to quit.”
He’s waiting for me to elaborate.
“I kept ‘accidentally’ ”—I hook my fingers in air quotes—“finding myself face to face with the dad. Naked. And, um—at attention.”
Chase gets this look on his face, tight and hard. I’ve thought this before, but I would so not like to be on the wrong side of him. Ever. “That asshole,” he says. “I’m gonna fry up that bastard’s balls if I ever meet him—”
His instant Neanderthal response—and the way his usually barely-there Texas accent comes out, the softness of the drawl in contrast to the anger on his face—makes me smile. It’s soooo Chase. “No need. I mentioned his difficulty with keeping himself clothed on his NannyMatch profile and also to his wife. I think she’s going to do the dirty work for you.”
An admiring smile spreads on Chase’s face. “You didn’t.”
“I did. Anyway,” I say, because I’m happy to move on from the naked dad imagery, and because I’m honestly caught a little off guard by how good Chase’s approval feels, “I gotta find a new job. I’ve got savings, and I’m staying in the apartment behind Eve’s house for now, but she’s got a tenant coming next week, so—yeah. In a pinch I can stay in her guest room for a while, but you know how I feel about that.”
I hate imposing on Eve, but even more so, I hate the fact that I don’t have family I can ask when I need a place to stay for a few days. I know Eve never begrudges it, but it just makes me aware of that missing piece.
“Anyway,” I say. “Point is, I can totally watch Katie tomorrow. And Saturday, for that matter. And then Mike’s is closed Sunday and Monday, and by then, hopefully, I’ll have a job and you’ll have a new nanny.” I look at my watch. “We should eat. I’m starving. Katie must be starving. Chase?”
He’s staring at me in the weirdest way.
“Chase?”
“What if—?” he begins, slowly. “What if I hired you? Like, not just for two days, but for real?”
I don’t have to think about it at all. “No. No way.”
“You need a job and a place to live. I need a new nanny.”
“Chase, no, don’t be ridiculous.”
“But, Livvy, listen. I woulda hired you in the first place if you hadn’t already had a job—”
“No, you wouldn’t have, because if you’d suggested it I would have told you it was a terrible idea.”
“I need your help, Liv.”
There’s something in his tone I haven’t heard before. Maybe…ever. Pleading. Chase doesn’t plead. He doesn’t even usually ask, which is one of the many things that makes me feel like he and I could never be involved—I’m not one of those women who wants a guy who’s all in charge all the time. I want a partnership of equals, and it’s pretty clear Chase wants to be the man on top. So the next words that come out of his mouth gobsmack me. “I don’t know how to do this.”
It hurts my chest, actually, hearing a guy like Chase, who’s Mr. Alpha, admit he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
“I don’t want to leave her with someone like Celia again. Someone I can’t trust, someone who might be making things worse instead of better. I feel like shit for not picking up sooner on the fact that Celia wasn’t competent. I should have known. She’d call to tell me that Katie was crying, she’d want to give her ice cream or put a TV show on, and that was it. That was the limit of what she had to offer. I can’t do that to Katie again.”
It makes me feel sad for both Celia and Katie, what he’s telling me. Because I know Celia at one point in her career had way more to give—and Ka
tie deserves so much better. But it also reminds me of something I’ve thought all along, that Chase and Katie need some time to work through this new relationship. To get used to being together all the time. They’re both good people—even if this isn’t what Chase would have chosen for himself—and I know they can learn to be a family. “Maybe you need to take some time off work.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t do that. Not right now. I already took almost two weeks off to deal with Thea’s arrangements and get Katie moved and settled in. I didn’t tell you this, but the guys and I were scoping out Big Win today, and they’ve got the edge in pretty much every possible way. With Big Win open now, I need to be stepping things up, not stepping aside.”
“Are you sure that’s the real reason?”
His brows draw together.
“Are you sure you aren’t just avoiding Katie?”
He gives me a withering look, like, cut the pop psych bullshit. Which is more like the Chase I know, and makes me smile.
“But if you keep putting someone else in charge with Katie, you’ll find yourself depending on that person and not stepping up with Katie. She needs you. You, not me, not some nanny.”
He changes tacks. “You said yourself, you don’t want to have to ask Eve if you can crash with her. This would solve that.”
He doesn’t know how tempting that sounds right now. “It’s not like I’d have to stay with Eve forever.”
“So maybe we do it this way. Just temporary. Just for a little bit, till Katie isn’t so fragile and I’m more confident. Like, start of school. We can say it’s just till the start of school. And that’s good for you, anyway, right? You can line something up for then.”
It’s true that it will probably be easier to find a job that starts then than one that starts now, in mid-July.
The idea of not living in Eve’s guest room has huge appeal.
I love Katie. And it would be such a delight to make her smile, to come up with a thousand great ways to distract her and help her find joy again. Plus, I’d wash her face and put her hair in pigtails.
And yet, no.
“This is crazy, Chase. I can’t work for you.”