The Billionaire Secret Nanny

I had done this forty-seven times. I had counted. Forty-seven professional childcare interviews across six years, starting from the one I had walked into eight months pregnant with three children nobody knew about yet, wearing a blazer borrowed from my neighbor and the particular expression of someone who had decided that desperation was a private matter. I was very good at interviews. I was very good at the specific performance of composure that interviewers needed to see before they trusted me with their children. I sat in the back of the agency car and rehearsed. The Crane family. Two children, Luca, six, and Maya, four. Live-in position, east wing of the private residence, six-month initial contract with the possibility of extension. The salary number that had made my hands shake when I saw it and which I had read three times to make sure I was not misreading a digit. I had read the salary. I had read the job description. I had not read the rest of the briefing documents because the salary and the job description were all I needed to decide, and I had learned, across six years of decisions made on limited information, to stop reading when I had what I needed. I called my mother before the car reached the end of my street. She answered on the second ring, which meant she had been holding the phone. She always held the phone when I was going somewhere she was not sure about. ‘You sound nervous,’ she said before I had said anything except hello. ‘You are never nervous.’ In the background, the triplets. Zac’s voice, precise and aggrieved: I did not hide it. I relocated it. Zoe, at maximum volume: You relocated it into your SOCK. And Zara, with the calm authority of someone who had been managing her siblings since they were old enough to be managed: Zac. Give it back. I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll call when I’m settled. Aria.’ Just my name. The specific way she said it when she knew something I did not want her to know. My mother had been reading me since I was four years old and had never once failed to locate the truth underneath whatever I was performing. I’ll call tonight, Mama, I said. ‘Kiss them for me.’ I ended the call before she could say anything else. The agency representative in the passenger seat turned slightly. She had the brisk efficiency of someone who had placed a lot of nannies and had developed the particular talent of making clients feel looked after without becoming genuinely invested in them. ‘We’re about twenty minutes out,’ she said. ‘Just a reminder, the family requests complete discretion. Mr. Crane values his privacy considerably.’ I said: Of course. Then: ‘Mr. Crane?’ Damien Crane. CEO of Crane Industries. It should all be in the briefing documents.’ She was already looking back at her phone. ‘He’s quite private about the household. I’m sure you understand.’ I understood. I understood a great deal, very suddenly, that I had not understood forty-five seconds ago. I said: Stop the car. I stood on the pavement outside the car and counted to forty-seven. I always counted to forty-seven when I needed to think. I did not know why forty-seven specifically. It was just the number that had always been enough. I thought about my mother’s medication, which cost more than it should and which we had been managing on a budget that was becoming increasingly unmanageable. I thought about three school enrolment forms sitting on the kitchen table at home that I had not signed yet because signing them meant paying the fees, and I did not yet have the money for the fees. I thought about Zac saying I relocated it into my sock and Zoe at maximum volume and Zara with her four-year-old authority, and I thought about five years of decisions made in the dark without anyone to help make them. I thought about a salary number that would change everything if I could get through six months. I got back in the car. I did not look at the representative. I looked at my hands in my lap, and I said: ‘Sorry. I’m ready. She said: ‘Of course.’ The car moved. The Crane mansion arrived through a set of iron gates that opened before the car reached them, which meant someone inside had been watching the drive. I noted this the way I noted everything automatically, cataloguing it for whatever it might be useful for later. The grounds were immaculate. The house was the kind of building that communicated wealth without trying to, which was the most expensive kind of communication. I had never been here. I had imagined it, in the first year, the way you imagined the world that had decided you were not enough for it. I had stopped imagining it sometime in year two when imagining it stopped being useful. The housekeeper met us at the door. She was efficient and kind in the way of someone who had been working in this household long enough to have opinions and professional enough not to share them. She took my bag. She showed me to the entrance hall. I stood in the entrance hall with my professional posture and my interview expression and the particular stillness of someone managing something enormous, and I looked at the marble floor and the high ceilings and the painting on the far wall that probably cost more than my mother’s house, and I thought: six months. Just six months. The number is worth six months. Footsteps on the stairs. I gave myself three seconds before I looked up. Three seconds to be ready. Three seconds to put everything I needed to put away into the place I kept it. I looked up. He had stopped on the fourth step. Five years. He looked the same and completely different simultaneously, which was the most disorienting thing about him and which I had not been prepared for despite having five years to prepare. The same face. The same grey eyes, the specific grey that my children had inherited and which I spent four years telling myself was a coincidence of genetics and not what it obviously was. But something in him that had not been there before. Something that looked like five years of consequences settling into the bones of a person who had been carrying them without telling anyone. He was looking at me the way I had spent five years trying not to think about being looked at. ‘Aria,’ he said. One word. My name. The way he had always said it, as if it were the answer to a question nobody else had thought to ask. I said: ‘Mr. Crane. I am here for the children.’ I walked past him toward the sound of children somewhere in the house to the left: small voices, a crash, the specific chaos of two unsupervised children finding the limits of their environment. I did not look back. I could not afford to look back. Behind me, I heard him exhale. One slow breath. The breath of someone recalibrating. My left hand was shaking. I closed it into a fist. Six months, I told myself. Just six months. I pushed open the playroom door. Two small faces turned toward me, one suspicious, one immediately curious. I smiled. It was my best smile, the real one I kept for children because children knew the difference. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name is Aria. I’m going to be looking after you for a while.’ Maya climbed off her chair and walked directly to me and took my hand, which was the most efficient trust I had ever been given. Luca looked at me with the assessing gaze of a six-year-old who had been disappointed before and was not investing until proven. I repeated to myself: just the nanny. Just six months. Just the nanny. I did not entirely believe it. But I had been doing hard things without believing in them for five years, and I was still here.