by J. D. Fox
“It is much, much more than I expected,” Genevieve told him, with the faintest remnant of overwhelmed surprise in her eyes. Olivier smiled to keep himself from saying the words his brain had supplied: that he heard that often from women.
“I am glad that you enjoy your new home,” he said instead.
They continued the tour, and Olivier showed his new nanny where his daughter’s room was: a little down the hall from her rooms, conveniently placed between where Genevieve would be staying and his own master suite on the upper level of the sprawling home. He pointed out the office she was not to go into at any time, and a few of the other spaces that he’d set aside for things involved in his business affairs. He took her into the back garden and showed Genevieve where Mathilde was growing her own flowers.
“One thing I would like to ask you,” Olivier said, once they’d gone back into the house and settled into the living room together, waiting for Mathilde’s arrival.
“Yes?” Genevieve set down the glass of water she’d gotten from the kitchen at his invitation, her face alight with bright interest.
“I am beginning a new business enterprise,” Olivier explained, choosing his words carefully. “As you can see, I need some...assistance?” He paused to check that that was the word he wanted.
“Assistance works. Or help,” Genevieve suggested.
“Yes, help,” Olivier agreed. “I need some help with improving my English. Would you be willing to add this to your responsibilities?” Genevieve considered it for a moment, and Olivier realized he was actually nervous at her response. At least a little bit.
“I think that sounds reasonable,” Genevieve said. “Would you want regular lessons?”
“I do not think that we have to be so formal,” Olivier said with a half smile. “We can decide at a later date.”
Olivier considered what he had in front of him. He had chosen Genevieve out of the applicants in no small degree because of her experience —and because of her fluency. She would be helpful to him, as well as to Mathilde.
“Is there a particular reason you need to improve on your English?” Genevieve sipped her water once more, and Olivier found himself briefly distracted by the sight of the tip of her tongue slipping just past her lips to catch the water that had gathered there.
“It is for business,” Olivier said, waving the details aside. “I have an interest that would make it...raisonnable?”
“Reasonable,” Genevieve suggested, and Olivier nodded.
“Reasonable to know more than I do at this moment.”
“I’d be happy to help,” Genevieve said with another polite smile. “Especially since you’re so generous with the benefits that come with this job.”
“Oh, that is nothing,” Olivier said, shrugging it off. “I wish for the quality of the living I can provide to reflect what I am able to spend.”
Before they could discuss the issue any further, Olivier heard the door chime from the front of the house sound and rose to his feet quickly. He smiled before he even realized what he was doing, knowing that the sound of the chime could mean only one thing: his daughter was home. He hurried out of the living room with Genevieve not far behind him and came into the front hallway just in time to see Mathilde finishing the process of taking off her shoes.
“Papa!” she cried out, turning to see him at the sound of his house shoes on the floor.
“Mathilde! Ma fille, c’est longtemps,” he told her, meeting her halfway. The child looked almost entirely like a miniature version of her mother: dark, curly hair and big, brown eyes that seemed to drink everything in. Her chin had more of her father’s shape, but her nose was--due to her youth--as yet little more than a button on her face.
“Papa, Papa! Je t’aime,” Mathilde chorused, right in his ear, burying her face against his neck as he hugged her close.
“We must speak English now,” Olivier told his daughter with gentle firmness. “Your new nanny is here.”
“You can speak French, I don’t mind,” Genevieve said from behind him. Olivier turned around and carefully deposited his daughter on her feet. Mathilde looked up at the woman he’d hired, and Olivier could sense the slight nervousness in his daughter’s demeanor.
“Bonjour, madame,” Mathilde said in her most polite voice.
“Bonjour, Mathilde,” Genevieve said. “Je suis ravie de te faire connaissance.” Olivier’s lips twitched with the start of a smile at the very polite French phrase. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“I am happy to meet you, too,” Mathilde said, remembering—finally, Olivier thought—that she was to speak English. She had begun learning at age two, through carefully selected television shows and a few lessons here and there, at Olivier’s insistence—but she still had the same kind of accent that he did, and she was apt to confuse one language for the other unless she tried very hard. The speech expert that Olivier had consulted on the subject had told him that it would go away with time and more exposure; he thought that having an English-speaking au pair would suit the purpose.
“Shall we get you a chocolat chaude, ma petite?” Olivier took his daughter’s hand and started back to the living room, to continue the introduction.
“Oui!” Mathilde looked at her new nanny curiously. “Do you like chocolat, madame?”
“Please call me Gen, Mathilde,” Genevieve said. “Or maybe Genny?” Mathilde beamed up at her nanny and at Olivier both.
“Nanny Genny,” she said, making it almost a song. “Oui, je l’aime.”
“I like that, too,” Genevieve agreed. “And yes—I like chocolate very much.”
“Then I believe you and Mathilde will be good friends,” Olivier said. “I’ll join you both in the salon when I’ve made my daughter her drink.” Genevieve nodded and offered Mathilde her hand, and Olivier watched as his friendly, lively daughter took the woman’s hand trustingly, and let her new caretaker lead her into the living room to wait for him.
Chapter Three
Gen watched as Mathilde skipped ahead of her, hurrying to get to the park near the house, and smiled slightly to herself. She had been in France for a week, and while it had taken her a few days to get her sleep schedule properly on track, she had to admit that the sleep she was getting was more restful than it had been for years beforehand. Maybe even since before she’d entered high school, and found herself in the narrow, fast-paced chute that was intended to land her in a competitive career, with all the world her banquet.
As they went through the wrought-iron gates into the park, Gen reflected on the enormity of what she’d left behind, and what she’d traded for it: the job she’d had before her parents’ arrest had been, by the standards she’d always been assured were the only important ones, an amazing one. Between her connections, the quality of her work, and the fact that she’d graduated from Yale with the best possible recommendations to situate herself, she’d been on the fast track to eventually become C-level. Her parents had always drilled into her head, even before she’d started school, the importance of being the best--and Gen had absorbed that lesson well.
A lot of good it did them, Gen thought wryly, remembering the last image she had of her parents: the sight of them standing in the courtroom, looking wan and white, shocked that all their prestige and money hadn’t secured them against charges of fraud and money laundering. The prison they’d gone to was very cushy by any real standard; after all, they were hardly common criminals. But it was a prison nonetheless, and they were both stuck there, in their separate spaces, for years to come—no amount of good behavior would take away the mandatory minimum, nor would it make what they’d done any less egregious in the eyes of the law.
“Genny! Look!” Mathilde was becoming more and more comfortable speaking in English, though she still spoke almost exclusively to her father in French; Olivier seemed pleased that his daughter was talking in her second language, th
ough it was too soon for them to have come up with any kind of lessons for developing her fluency.
Gen obediently looked at the direction Mathilde had pointed in and saw that the five-year-old was interested in the public exercise equipment placed in the park grounds for people to use. “Be careful,” she suggested. It would be easy for her to watch Mathilde as the girl went from one machine to the other, from the benches nearby. There were few people in the park that morning and fewer kids. Gen sat down, and Mathilde rushed to the first of the public-access machines; something that approximated an elliptical, but without the resistance or space-age materials. Genevieve smiled and nodded for the girl to do as she liked before she settled into her spot, glancing around a bit just to keep track of what was going on around her.
She was supposed to keep herself and Mathilde out of the house for at least an hour and a half; apparently, Olivier had a business associate coming over to discuss something and needed the privacy. It suited Gen just fine since the day was clear and there was not much of a chance of rain; besides which, if Mathilde tired herself out in the park she would be more likely to have a nap after lunch, which meant that she would have some time entirely to herself. We can go to the boulangerie on the way back to the house, pick up a snack, and then I can catch up on emails.
Messages had started trickling in from the people she’d known in her old life; Gen had expected that, at some point, they would. People wanted to know where she had gone, what she had been doing with herself, and Gen didn’t have an answer that she thought they would buy. Surely none of her friends from college would believe her when she told them that within a week of her parents’ conviction and sentencing, she’d sold her apartment, put in her notice, and started applying to become an au pair. Gen smiled slightly to herself, feeling a little chagrined at what she knew the reactions would be to the truth of her situation.
But the fact was that after seeing how her parents went down, and the deafening silence from the people who had claimed to be on her side in the wake of it, Gen had known she’d needed a change. Not just a job change, or a new apartment—nothing so shallow as that. She’d been sitting in the middle of her apartment, the night before the trial for her parents was set to conclude. “I own too much junk,” she’d said, out loud, to herself, looking around her living room in utter bemusement. The art on the walls that she’d bought from exclusive galleries, the books on her shelf that she’d collected, more to say she owned them than because she liked them.
Even the ring on her finger, given to her almost a year before, when her parents had still been free and rich, had seemed like too much. The first thing that Gen had done was to put the ring in an envelope along with a short message she’d written explaining that she was releasing her fiancé, and then put it with the mail she had to send out. She’d known that it wasn’t going to take Clint very much by surprise to receive it; he’d been one of the voices that had gone mysteriously silent as soon as her parents’ fortunes had turned so disastrously. He was—she’d thought—probably just hoping she would let him go without too much of a fight.
That had been the start of a process that had seen her reduce everything she owned to a suitcase and a storage unit and a purse. There were a few family heirlooms that Gen had wanted to hold onto, but everything she’d bought for herself apart from five books, a jewelry box, and some clothes had either been sold or given away. She could just imagine the look on Megan Peters’s face when her friend heard that Gen had stripped down her wardrobe to no more than two weeks’ worth of clothes and 5 pairs of shoes. Clint had never written back or even called, and the company she’d worked for had been happy to let her put in her notice, in light of her new family connection to convicted felons. It had been all too easy from a logistical point of view.
“Genny!” Gen looked around to see as Mathilde moved to another one of the machines, and nodded her approval as the five-year-old wrestled with an odd-looking system of levers and pulleys that seemed to be geared towards exercising the arms and back.
“Make sure you don’t hurt yourself, Mattie,” Gen told the little girl, reminding herself to pay attention to the child. She glanced around quickly to see the other parents and caretakers in the area, making sure she didn’t look negligent, but Gen had already noticed that French standards of childcare were far more relaxed than American ones. The French seemed to think that it was a good idea to begin fostering independence in their children as young as possible—Olivier had even said that after the first week or so, he didn’t think it would be necessary for her to walk to school with Mathilde if she didn’t want to. The school wasn’t far away from his house, but it was still a distance that most American authorities and parents would agree was not safe at all for a child to navigate on their own.
She kept an eye on the little girl until the timer on her phone went off, alerting Gen to the fact that they’d been away from the house for an hour. “Are you ready to go home yet, ma petite?” Gen rose to her feet, thinking about the precious alone time she possibly had ahead of her.
“Oui! Can we…” Mathilde screwed her face up in concentration, and Gen knew that the girl was trying to think of the English phrase for what she wanted.
“Tu veux aller à la boulangerie?” Mathilde’s eyes widened, and she beamed happily.
“Oui! Yes!” Gen chuckled and gestured for Mathilde to come to her side. While there was nothing all that untoward about letting a child walk on their own, Gen hadn’t yet gotten the courage to let her young charge farther away from her side than maybe a few steps, at least when they were going somewhere together. In the park it was different.
They left the park together, and Genevieve turned left instead of right, heading in the direction of the closest bakery to the park. It would add some more time to their absence from the house, which Gen thought was probably for the best. The bakery also boasted some of the best viennoiseries she had ever tasted: croissants that were so flaky and buttery that she couldn’t imagine ever buying one in the US again in her life, along with pains au chocolat so rich and delicious that it felt sinful to eat them. They even had brioche with a white chocolate filling that Gen had managed to try on one of her first evenings in the country when she’d taken to the streets to get to know the area, as Mathilde and Olivier visited her grandparents for dinner.
Gen looked up at the buildings that lined the street from the park to the bakery, taking a slow, deep breath as she appreciated the beauty of them. She hoped that she would never get over her sense of wonder at the sight of the town she had come to, that it would never get old to see the timbered, medieval-era buildings, the cobbled streets, the stately old beauty of everything. She’d done some research into the home she’d moved into, and while Olivier had done a lot of upgrading and renovating, there were certain things that he wasn’t allowed to alter by virtue of the building itself being historical. Few places in the town weren’t older than the US; in fact, some of them were considerably older than the country that Gen had been born in, and there was something that seemed utterly magical about that fact.
Planters filled with pansies or geraniums lined the ground-level window sills and peeked out from the sides of building doors, and Mathilde skipped next to her, not caring about anything but the possibility of a treat before they went home. Occupied with her outing to the park and the prospect of a sweet, the five-year-old showed no sign at all of being concerned about the fact that they had to be away from the house for an hour or more—or any worry at all about what her father could be doing. Gen was more than a little curious about her new employer’s business, which she realized she hadn’t gotten much information about; but she reminded herself that given the pay she was getting and the quarters she’d gotten, it was far from her business to question him.
“Bonjour Madame, Mademoiselle,” the baker said as they entered the boulangerie. Gen smiled and returned the greeting, Mathilde echoing her. It would—she knew—eventually become a
full force of habit to say hello to every shopkeeper, cashier, or other employees that she had to deal with. It was basic French courtesy; even in asking for directions of a stranger in the street, it was expected that a person begin with “hello.”
“What would you like, Mathilde?” She had a budget of about twenty euros per week that she could use for buying treats for the girl, and fortunately, there were few things that Mathilde might want in the bakery that were more than two euros.
“Pain au chocolat! Pain au chocolat!” It was the predictable answer, and Gen nodded to the baker to affirm that that was what they would have.
“Et pour vous, Madame?” Genevieve looked over the case of goodies and tried to decide. Did she want something simple, or a little more decadent?
“Je voudrais un croissant d’amandes, s’il vous plait,” she told the woman finally. It was a good compromise: frangipane filling in a croissant topped with toasted almonds. The woman nodded her approval of Gen’s choice and plucked the two treats from the case, depositing them in separate paper sacks and handing them over the counter before ringing them up. Gen looked around the little, homey shop, and out through the window onto the old fashioned street, and decided that of the choices she’d made in her life, at least she knew that coming to the little town in France to be this child’s caretaker was one she knew she would never regret.
Chapter Four
Olivier settled into the seat at his desk and exhaled slowly, glancing at the clock. Genevieve and Mathilde were out of the house for an hour or longer, and he didn’t think the call he had scheduled would take that long. The next job on his plate was a risky one, but Olivier reminded himself of what the stakes were, at least as far as he was concerned: the next job would bring in enough money to allow him to retire comfortably and to cover his daughter’s expenses throughout her school years and university education, making sure she was well-established.