The Billionaire Secret Nanny

Chapter Two: The First Night

My room was in the east wing, which was the staff wing, which was correct and appropriate and exactly what I needed it to be. Clean. Quiet. A window that looked out over the garden rather than the drive, which meant I could see the roses and the old oak tree and not the gates I had argued myself through earlier that afternoon.

More comfortable than anything I had slept in for five years, which I noted and immediately stopped noting because noting it led to thinking about what that said about the last five years, and I did not have the capacity for that particular line of thought tonight.

I sat on the edge of the bed and called home.

Gladys answered with the triplets already in frame, which meant she had been holding the phone pointed at them and waiting. Zoe appeared first; she always appeared first, the loudest and the most immediately present of the three, the one who had come into the world twelve minutes behind her siblings and had been making up for it ever since.

‘Mama! Zac said I can’t be a princess because I have mud on my dress, but princesses CAN have mud because Zara said so and Zara is usually right.’

‘Zoe is absolutely right,’ I said. ‘Muddy princesses are the best kind. The mud is part of the adventure.’

From somewhere off-screen: ‘That’s not historically accurate.’ Zac. Four years old and already fact-checking. I did not know where he had learned the phrase historically accurate. I suspected, in the part of myself I did not examine, that it had come from the same place as his grey eyes and his particular stillness when he was thinking. I did not examine that part.

We talked for forty minutes. I told them I was staying at a very big house for work and that Grandma was in charge, and that they needed to be good. I told them I would call every day. I told each of them I loved them three times, which was the number Zara had decided was correct when she was two and a half and which had become the rule.

After I ended the call, I sat with the specific silence of a mother separated from her children and let myself feel the weight of it for exactly sixty seconds. I counted. Then I put it away in the place I kept things that needed to be felt but not performed, and I got up and went to the kitchen to make tea because I could never sleep in new places.

Helena Crane summoned me at seven.

I had been expecting this. Not at seven specifically, but on the first evening, in the formal sitting room, with the particular choreography of a woman who had been establishing the hierarchy of her household for thirty years and was not going to do it any differently now.

She was impeccable. Silver hair. The kind of posture that communicated she had never once sat in a chair without considering what the sitting communicated. A gracious smile that arrived precisely on schedule and departed precisely on schedule and communicated nothing beyond its own functionality.

I recognized her immediately. She recognized me. Neither of us showed it, which was its own kind of communication. ‘Miss Cole,’ she said. I understand you come highly recommended. Thank you for the opportunity, Mrs. Crane.

A pause that would have appeared to a neutral observer as a comfortable silence, and which was not a comfortable silence.

I hope you understand, she said, ‘the importance of discretion in a household like this. We value our privacy. Both Mr. Crane’s and the children’s. Completely.

Another pause. ‘Good. Then we understand each other.’

She did not ask if my room was comfortable. She did not offer tea. She dismissed me with a single nod and the gracious expression of someone who had concluded the meeting she needed to conduct and had already moved past it mentally before I had stood up. I went back to my room and sat very still for a long time.

She had not said: I remember you. She had not said: I know exactly who you are and what you were to my son and what you cost this family to remove. She had said none of those things.

She had not needed to. That was what made her so effective and so dangerous. She never needed to say the obvious thing because the obvious thing was always already understood between them.

I was in the kitchen at eleven when he came in.

The kettle was almost done. I was standing at the counter with my back to the door, which was a mistake I did not usually make, and I heard his footsteps a half-second before the door opened. I did not turn. I had made the calculation that turning would communicate something, and not turning would communicate something else, and not turning was the better option.

I can go if you need the kitchen, I said. A pause. It’s your kitchen too. While you’re here.

I turned then, because the sentence required it. He was leaning in the doorway with the specific exhaustion of a man who had been performing authority all day and had run out of the energy required to maintain the performance. He was not performing anything in this kitchen at eleven at night. He was just tired. Just a man standing in his own kitchen, being tired.

I found this considerably more difficult to manage than the performance would have been. How are you, Aria? My name again. The way he said it.

I’m fine, Mr. Crane. Thank you. You don’t have to call me that. Yes, I do,’ I said. It’s appropriate.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he crossed to the cabinet, took out a glass, and filled it with water. He did not make conversation. He did not press. He simply existed in the kitchen for two more minutes and then went back upstairs, and I stood at the counter and held my tea and waited until his footsteps had reached the top of the stairs before I exhaled.

My phone buzzed. An email from the agency.

Just to confirm, Mr. Crane has requested that a twelve-month contract extension clause be added to your agreement. Please review and sign the updated terms at your earliest convenience.

Twelve months. He had already extended my contract. I had been in this house for six hours.

I stared at the email for a very long time in the quiet kitchen of the Crane mansion and thought about what it meant that the man upstairs had done that and thought about whether I was going to examine what it meant or file it in the place I kept things I was not ready to examine.

I filed it. I went to bed. I lay in the clean, quiet room of the Crane mansion east wing and looked at the ceiling and thought about a twelve-month extension clause and what it meant that he had done that before we had exchanged twenty words, and I did not sleep for a long time.