The Billionaire Secret Nanny

Chapter Three: What Luca Sees

By the third morning, I had the children’s rhythms.

Luca woke at six-thirty, which was earlier than Maya, and spent the first twenty minutes of consciousness in a state of maximum opinion about everything, the breakfast options, the light coming through the curtains, the specific texture of his cereal. He was not difficult. He was precise, which was different. He had decided what things should be like, and he communicated his assessments clearly and expected them to be taken seriously, which they were, because he was usually right.

Maya woke at seven-fifteen and immediately required proximity. She did not speak much in the mornings. She simply appeared beside you and stayed there, warm and solid, until she was ready to participate in the day. I understood this instinctively. Zoe was the same.

I had managed triplet mornings for four years. One child was extraordinary in its manageability.

Luca was suspicious of me in the specific way of a six-year-old who had watched four nannies arrive and depart and had learned not to invest. He answered my questions. He participated in the activities. He was not rude. He was simply withholding judgment, which was the most mature response to my presence in the room and which I respected entirely.

By eleven, he showed me his dinosaur collection.

I understood this was significant. I treated it accordingly with the full focused attention of someone who understood that being shown something precious by a child was not a small thing, that the showing was a form of trust being extended, that the correct response was complete presence rather than polite interest. I asked questions. Good ones, the kind that came from actually listening. By the time we finished discussing the relative merits of the stegosaurus versus the ankylosaurus in terms of defensive strategy, Luca had decided I was acceptable.

I had the particular satisfaction of work done exactly as it should be done.

He appeared in the playroom doorway at noon.

I did not see him immediately. I was on the floor with Luca, building something that had started as a castle and had evolved, through negotiation, into a fortified research station for paleontological excavation. Maya was asleep against my side with the complete commitment of someone who had decided that my shoulder was the correct place to be and that the afternoon was for sleeping.

I became aware of him the way I always became aware of him before I saw him, some change in the air of the room, the specific quality of attention that arrived when he was present. I looked up.

He was standing in the doorway. He had been there for a while. I could tell from the quality of his stillness that he had been watching for longer than the moment I noticed him, and I could tell from his expression in the half-second before he managed it that what he had been watching had produced something in him he had not been prepared for.

He managed it. He was very good at managing things. But I had known him when he was not good at managing things, and I still had the muscle memory of reading him, and the half-second had been enough.

I’ll have lunch sent up,’ he said. Thank you,’ I said.

He stayed in the doorway for a moment longer than the exchange required. Then he left. I looked back at the fortified research station. Luca was already explaining the structural reinforcement requirements for the eastern perimeter. I listened. I did not think about the doorway.

I retreated to my room after lunch while the children had their quiet hour. I sat on my bed with my phone and called Gladys.

They crowded the screen immediately. Zara first, then Zoe, then Zac with his serious eyes and his assessment expression that was so precisely his father’s that some days I had to remind myself to breathe normally when I looked at him.

They told me everything. The mud situation from the previous afternoon had been resolved satisfactorily, according to Zara. Zoe maintained it was mostly resolved and there had been some residual unfairness, and Zac declined to comment because he was still forming his position.

I was laughing at something Zoe was doing with her hair, she had decided it should look like a crown, and the interpretation was experimental when the door opened.

I had not locked it. I should have locked it. I had been locking it every evening, but I had not thought to lock it in the middle of the afternoon with the children in their rooms.

Luca. He had forgotten to knock. He came in with the particular directness of children who are going somewhere with a specific purpose and have not yet developed the habit of social hesitation. He was holding something, a book- I registered in the periphery of my attention, and he was looking at my phone screen.

Three small faces looking back from the screen. Zara is assessing the new environment. Zoe was waving enthusiastically at the stranger. Zac, still and watchful, studied Luca with the focused attention he gave everything.

Luca tilted his head. He said: ‘They look like Daddy.’

I ended the call so fast my thumb slipped, and I had to press it twice. The screen went dark. I put the phone on the bed and looked at Luca and felt my heart doing something entirely outside my control.

Those are my children, I said. Very carefully. They live with their grandmother while I work. Luca said: ‘They have Daddy’s eyes.’

‘Lots of people have grey eyes,’ I said. The sentence arrived in my mouth without my involvement. ‘It’s a common color.’

Luca considered this with the systematic thoroughness of a six-year-old evaluating a logical argument against existing data. Then: ‘I guess so.’ He held up the book he had been carrying. I wanted to show you this one. It has a whole chapter on the Cretaceous period that the other one didn’t have.

He showed me the chapter. I read the relevant sections with him. He left satisfied.

I sat on my bed after he left and did not move for a long time.

A knock at my door. I looked at it. Then on my phone. Then at the door again.

His voice, through the door. Not loud. Not insistent. Just present. ‘I owe you an explanation. About five years ago. I know you don’t want to hear it. I’m going to tell you anyway, not tonight, but soon. I need you to know that I’m going to tell you.’

I sat very still. I heard him wait. One minute. Maybe longer. Then his footsteps moved away down the corridor.

Still on the bed with my phone dark in my hands and thought about a six-year-old saying they look like Daddy with the casual certainty of someone reporting an observation, and I thought about five years, and I thought about what it meant that he had come to my door to say that.

I thought: three months. I need to be gone in three months. I thought it very firmly, but it did not help as much as it should have.