So, maybe I should not be surprised by the shocked look on the face of Holt’s Slavic bodyguard and driver when he gets out of the car to find me standing beside Holt rather than the stunning brunette he drove here.
“Hi, Yahto,” I say, remembering our very awkward introduction in Ixtapa. I am also deeply aware that I reek of the sex I just had with Holt.
Holt adds, “Ms. Kent took an Uber home. It’s just Sylvie and me.”
Ms. Kent. Even her name sounds rich and beautiful! A pang of guilt hits me hard as the car pushes forward into the heavy Friday night traffic on Greenwich Ave. This isn’t me, I keep thinking to myself as we make the ten-minute drive back to Holt’s estate. Ruining first dates? Having sex in bathrooms? Trading sex to get an end date to my contract? Who has Holt turned me into?
When the car slows outside the main house, I push on the passenger door before the vehicle comes to a complete stop. And when I manage to open it and jump out of the car, it feels like I have burst out of a coffin. I run to my little cottage, ignoring Holt as he calls out my name behind me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I don’t go to him that night.
Or the next.
And things might have gone on like that forever. With me serving my time and pretending my employer in the main house doesn’t exist.
But the following Monday as I jog down the school steps after dropping Wes off, a large man steps in front of me. He is swarthy and olive-skinned. Definitely not a black man. But for some reason, he reminds me a lot of Javon. Other than the difference in skin color, their overall vibes feel the same. This guy is big and bulky, with a suit so tailored, it somehow reads like a uniform.
I freeze, my throat filling with fear.
And then, as if to confirm my suspicions of whose payroll he’s on, the man says, “Got someone who wants to talk to you.”
I blink, not understanding. Also… “Um, I am expected back home in ten minutes.” Which is sort of true. Barron only has a single afternoon lecture today, and I was planning to stop at Starbucks, but now I really, really want to go straight home.
“Won’t take long,” the man says, cupping my elbow and leading me to an idling Bentley.
I would like to say I am surprised to find Jack Calson waiting for me in the back seat when I climb in, but I am not. The truth is, I have been expecting him to show up ever since I stepped foot onto Holt’s estate. And if we are speaking truth, I’m only surprised it took him this long to make an appearance.
“This ain’t what we agreed to, girlie,” Jack says after his guard shuts the car door behind me.
There’s no small talk or even a hello, how are you doing since the last time I threatened you?
But again, I am not surprised. There wasn’t any small talk the first time we met, either. Just Javon all but shoving me into a car a few hours after I came down in Holt’s apartment elevator, screaming for help.
Holt’s father had been in the backseat of that car, too. Along with a lawyer in thin black glasses who repeatedly wiped the sweat from his forehead as he walked me through the contract Jack Calson wanted me to sign. It was one of the hottest summers on record in Connecticut. And even that fancy car’s air conditioning couldn’t keep up.
But this time, Jack Calson sits alone. This time, I am not a scared girl whose would-be fiancé just overdosed. And this time, it is chilly in the car, with a fall wind swirling dead leaves outside the car windows in an ominous reminder of how easy it is for beautiful things to die.
“I am not in breach of contract,” I answer. “I still haven’t told him what really happened that night and I won’t.”
Big Jack gives me a look so assessing, I’m instantly reminded of Holt. “I’m talking about our verbal agreement.”
I shake my head. “I stayed away from him. Holt moved on and married like you wanted. I had no idea Wes was his son when I met him.”
“And how about fucking him in that restaurant bathroom?” Jack asks. “Is that what you consider staying away?”
I take a deep breath, not interested in or feeling capable of explaining my very complicated sex life with Jack’s son. Instead I say, “I am leaving in January. I won’t be a problem after that, and he will never find out.”
Jack’s jaw tightens and though I don’t smell tobacco on him, it sure looks like he’s chewing on a wad as he considers my words. “What’s keeping you from giving your two-week notice today?”
“Holt is,” I answer. “He poisoned the waters at my last job so I would be forced to accept his offer to become Wes’s nanny. I am still not sure if he really needed the childcare or if this is his idea of revenge.”
“Probably both, knowing my boy,” Jack answers, his Arkansas accent as loose-jawed as Holt’s is Connecticut tight. “You shouldn’t never let yourself cross paths with a Calson twice, if you escaped the first time. And that boy of his is a handful. Which is why I ain’t none too happy about you ruining his chances with my first-round pick for his next wife.”
I am not happy about it either. And I also wonder if Holt realizes his father was part of the vetting process for Holt’s most recent date.
I fold my hands in my lap and quietly wait to hear what Jack will say next. There’d been a big speech ten years ago.
“You’ve got a choice, girlie,” he told me. “Holt will be all right without you, more than all right. But if you stay with him, I will not hesitate to ruin the lives of those you care about the way you will ruin his future if you continue with this relationship. You are young and might not think you need money to be happy. But let me tell you, your mama does. From what I have found out, her and your sick daddy are swimming in bills. Bills I can pay, nice and discreet. A charitable donation from a Christian organization that heard her story and wants to help. After your daddy dies, she’ll be sad but she won’t have any more money worries. Not like the kind she’ll have if I decided to punish her for her daughter’s crimes.”
Jack, as it turned out, had been the answer to repairing the rift that had driven me straight into Holt’s arms in the first place. I showed up with a check at my mother’s door just as she was coming home from the hospital with the worst news of her life. Daddy could not survive any longer without a ventilator, but in a moment of pride she had no idea he had been keeping in reserve, he refused to be fitted for one. So instead of sending him home with a ventilator, Daddy was sent to a hospice where he would die. Sooner than any of us expected.
My mother needed me and the check I told her I’d secured from a Christian organization. And Holt…well, he didn’t. The paramedics who attended to him had said he would recover, and in the few minutes I had to consider Jack Calson’s offer, I realized the truth of things.
Not only did Holt not need me, I had cushioned his freefall into drugs by not insisting he go to rehab. It was because of me that he was vulnerable to an overdose. Back then, I didn’t have a word for how I felt about myself during those four hours after receiving the news that Holt would make a full recovery. But in the years that followed, I encountered it time and time again as I attempted to parse what had happened that summer.
I was an enabler. I had enabled him, and this meant Jack Calson was right. Holt and I were bad together. Then and now. All we do is ruin each other.
So, though I loathed Holt’s father for always being the devil in the backseat offering me impossible choices, I found myself nodding at him and asking, “What do you want me to do?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“I see here you worked as the program director at The Tourmaline for a number of years, but now you work in Connecticut?” the director of CIT’s on-site childcare center asks me two weeks later.
The woman on the other side of a very messy desk reminds me a lot of myself asking the same type of leading questions when I used to interview candidates for childcare positions. Except this interview is in person, while most of my interviews took place over the phone. Like many international resort chains, the Tourmaline Ixtapa put a p
remium value on diverse, international hires. Oh, and now I am seated in the candidate chair instead of behind the desk.
“Yes, that’s right,” I answer smoothly. “I was commissioned to come here by a client. But I am unable to disclose his name due to an NDA.”
“Oh, I suspect I already know who he is considering Jack Calson recommended you for this job,” the woman says with a wink. “But despite working for this VIP client, you want to take a step down and work for the CIT Center Daycare?”
“My son attends CIT as an undergrad. I would like to combine his opportunity with my own and pursue a degree…”
The woman tilts her head, confused. “But CIT doesn’t offer any Early Childhood Education or teaching programs. What degree are you planning to pursue here?”
“Oh, ah…psychology,” I answer haltingly. “I think my background in childcare will make me a good candidate to become a child psychologist.”
It feels weird to say this to her. I have never spoken this particular dream aloud. Not even to Barron. Or Holt, the boy who first put the idea in my head ten years ago.
But lest she mistake my discomfort for something it’s not, I rush to assure her of the many other reasons I am the perfect fit for this daycare job.
By the time the interview is over, the daycare director is glowing like she just won the lottery. “We’ll see you in two weeks, Sylvie!” she says, giving me a warm hug after she walks me out of her office.
Barron, however, is not nearly as happy when, later that day, I show him around the Stamford apartment we’ll be moving into two weeks from now.
“I know it’s not as big as the guest cottage, but it is sunny and bright,” I say as I watch Barron sullenly shuffle around the apartment with its beige carpets and even beiger walls. “It’s a bus ride to CIT, but the stop is very close, and like Greenwich, there are plenty of places we can walk to in this neighborhood.”
“Yeah, but…” Barron’s looks out of a window that holds a far-off view of the Long Island Sound, rather than a waterfront view of Indian Harbor. “I still do not understand why you have to switch jobs. Wes and me like things the way they are. And I know you don’t like his dad, but he is never there.”
My heart squeezes. I guess I hadn’t been able to keep my conflicted feelings about Holt a secret. But of course, things are more complicated than my feelings about Holt. Barron is much, much smarter than the average child. But he is still a child. Too young to understand what is really going on here. And I wonder, not for the first time, if he would reject me like my mother did if he knew what I’d done, the secrets I continue to keep in order to return our lives back to normal…
For that reason and more, there is a sigh in my voice as I answer his “do not understand” with, “Barron…”
“I’m just saying we can move out of their house but you don’t have to change jobs.”
I sigh and give him the same line I gave the daycare director. “Wes is a great kid, but I like to work with groups of children. Plus, if I work at the daycare I can take classes at CIT for free. This is important because I will need a lot of schooling to get both my undergraduate and Masters degrees.”
Barron rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you want to get a Master’s degree?”
I pause, not only because I do not appreciate my son’s dismissive tone, but also because I am just now realizing he has no idea who I was before he was born. That when I was younger, I had hopes and dreams, same as him.
“Lydia wasn’t the only smart one in our family,” I tell him now. “I got into college, same as her. I just did not go.”
“Why not?”
I shrug and shake my head. “Life,” I answer, as vague as I can possibly be without frustrating my genius son. “But if I work for the CIT daycare center, I can figure out a way to make my long-delayed dreams come true. And you know, I believe it is even better to complete my schooling now. Back when I first got into college, I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life. Now I do.”
Barron’s eyes stay sad as he looks out the window, and instead of trying to convince him how nice our life will be when we are no longer living under Holt’s thumb, I come to stand beside him.
“I know you will miss Wes. He is your friend in a way the older kids at CIT cannot be.”
“It’s not just that…” Barron answers, his voice flat with disappointment. “If I lose access to Wes, I can no longer track his emotions. That means I won’t be able to help him.”
“Ah…” I screw up my face, not quite understanding how his bioHelmet could help Wes.
“I read his father’s Wikipedia page,” Barron explains off my confused look. “Wes could have emotional problems all his life, and I was thinking maybe the bioHelmet might help with stuff like that, too. It could do more than read brain waves. It could help him—I could help him! But now…I won’t be able to.”
“Oh, Barron…”
He is ten now. A ten-year-old college student and nearly as tall as me besides, thanks to the long genes he inherited from his father. But I hug him anyway, like I used to when he was a little boy and all I had left in the world. Because just when I start thinking we could not be any more different, I realize we do have something in common. Our over-the-top empathy that makes us abandon our own life plans so we can go overboard for a Calson we’ve just met.
And Barron must really be sad, because he lets me hold him for a few more seconds than usual before pulling away and saying, “We should leave now if we want to get to Wes’s school on time.”
He’s right, and with a quick walk downstairs, we get on a bus that will drop us off right in front of CIT, just a few minutes by foot from Wes’s public school.
However, my phone goes off halfway through the ride. It’s Allie, Holt’s assistant.
“Hello, Allie, how are you?” I answer, my heartbeat speeding up.
I haven’t spoken to Holt since the restaurant fiasco last Friday. And much like I had been waiting for his father to show up, I had also been waiting for Holt to make his next move.
But as it turned out, Allie’s call has nothing to do with Holt.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I hate it here!” Wes yells as soon as I walk into the classroom where he has been detained after the incident. “Tell her I am not going here anymore! You can homeschool me, just like you did Ender!”
I ignore him and go to where the teacher is seated behind her desk, looking like a reluctant jailer. “Hello, my name is Sylvie Pinnock,” I say, holding out my hand for a shake.
“Hi, Sylvie. I’m Ms. Garcia, Wes’s teacher,” the frazzled woman answers, clasping my hand.
“So very nice to meet you,” I say with a gentle smile, thinking of the afternoon drinks I ordered for the Ixtapa Kinder Club staff after Wes trashed the art room.
“I wish it was under better circumstances,” she answers, throwing Wes a doleful look.
“It’s your own stupid fault,” Wes spits from his desk. “You shouldn’t have put me next to Dale! He’s stupid, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And if I have to stay in this school, I’m going to kill him.” He turns his angry stare toward me. “Tell them I’m not going here anymore!”
“Do you mind if I speak with Wes alone?” I ask the teacher.
“Not at all,” the teacher answers, grabbing her purse and rushing from the classroom like a released prisoner.
After she leaves, I tilt my head and say, “Hello, Wes.”
“Tell her I’m not coming back here!” Wes screams in response.
“Hello, Wes,” I repeat. Then I level him with my Jamaican mom eyes until he finally mumbles, “Hi.”
“It’s good to see you,” I say, sitting down at the little desk directly across from his. There is a laminated green name card on it that says Dale Milano. I am guessing this desk belongs to the same Dale who asked me the other day if Wes really has his own videogame room and if so, could they have a playdate. And perhaps Dale really is the reason Wes has his hands cross
ed over his chest and his face puffy from crying.
“How was your day?” I ask him.
“How do you think it was?” he answers, voice snotty as I have ever heard it.
“Wes, my friend, you need to revisit your tone and try that again,” I answer, my voice still deliberately calm.
“Bad!” he spits out. “My day was bad. Because of her…and Dale.”
“Tell me more about this Dale. Is he a friend?”
“No! He acted like he was going to be my friend, but then he called me a crybaby.”
“He said you were a crybaby? Why would he say this? Did something happen?”
“Kinda,” Wes mumbles. “These kids were playing soccer and I kept on getting the ball but every time I kicked it, the goalie would block it or catch it. The other boys stopped passing it to me because they said I couldn’t kick.”
“And you became frustrated, is that right?”
Wes nods miserably. “I haven’t cried once since coming here. But now all the boys are saying I’m a crybaby. And Dale says he doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.”
“No, mon! Did he really say this to you?”
Wes nods again. “Then he asked Miss Garcia if he could change desks because he said he doesn’t want to sit next to a crybaby.”
“You are not serious.”
“Yeah, he said that! He said it in front of the whole class!” Wes answers, his face crumpling with remembered pain.
I give the situation some consideration and then say, “Oh my goodness, Wes! How lucky! This is the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“What?” Wes says, looking at me like I have gone crazy. “No, it isn’t!”
“Oh, but yes, it is. Dale acted like he was going to be a true friend to you, but you put that boy to the real test, didn’t you now? Made him show his true colors before you invited him to your home. As my good friend Prin would say, ‘now you know he ain’t shit.’”
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