PART 6:

There’s a confidentiality clause. There’s a clause about speaking to press. There’s a clause about photographs. Her eyes flicked just once to June. We’ve had incidents, people who got close and then got paid by other people to talk. You understand? It’s nothing personal. It’s all personal, Marin said. That’s the part you keep getting wrong.

Something cooled behind Sloan’s eyes, the pleasantness going thin over the steel. Let me be direct since plainess seems to be your brand. Mrs. Hail does not want you here. Mr. Hail at the moment does. My job is to make Mr. Hail’s life run smoothly, and a war between him and his mother over the household help does not run smoothly.

So she slid the tablet across the table. You sign the real contract, you take the real salary, and you become a problem I can manage. or you stay on your handshake and you’re weak and you become a problem I solve a different way. I genuinely rather the first one. You seem to be good with the kid. Marin looked at the tablet.

She looked at the number, which was the same insulting fortune as before. She looked at June, who had stopped eating and gone very still. The way she went still when grownup weather gathered, her small hand creeping across the table toward Marin’s sleeve. You see that? Marin said softly, not to Sloan, almost to herself.

She can hear it, the tone. She can’t follow the words, but she’s got the tone down cold. She knows what it sounds like when adults are deciding things about her over her head. She put her hand over Jun’s. That’s what she’s been drowning in. Everybody managing her. Everybody solving her. That’s very moving. Sloan said.

Sign the contract. No paper. Marin stood gathering both plates. He shook my hand. That holds till Sunday. Same as I said. You want to solve me before then, you take it up with him. Sloan Whitfield watched her carry the dishes to the sideboard, and when she spoke again, the glaze was gone entirely, and what was underneath was almost respect and entirely warning.

“You think he’s the soft one and she’s the hard one,” she said. Julian and his mother. That’s the read everyone gets in the first day. She stood, collected her tablet, slid the sunglasses back down. Stay long enough and you’ll find out it’s the other way around. He’s the one with something to lose. She paused at the door.

Ask him where he goes Thursday nights. Ask him why no nannies ever lasted past a Thursday. Then come find me about that contract. and she was gone, heels ticking away across the marble, leaving the question hanging in the green sunroom light held breath. It worked on Marin all day, the way a splinter works, present in everything she did, and impossible to look at straight. She didn’t want it to.

She told herself, “A woman like Sloan traded in exactly that, a poisoned little seed dropped in passing, designed to grow. Ask him where he goes Thursday nights.” It was Monday. She had two days to not think about it. And she thought about it through all of them. She thought about it while she and June built a city out of the toys still in their boxes, finally freed.

June arranging the little wooden cars in a line by color the way she’d arranged the sugar packets, pink first. She thought about it while she found in the back of a closet a child-sized rain slicker and rubber boots with frogs on them, and June touched the frogs for a long time without taking them out. She thought about it during the long cold afternoon when she walked June down to the unused pool and they sat on the warm tile with their feet in the water and the sprinklers hissed across the lawn and a heron came down at the far end and stood on one leg like it owned

the place and June laughed, actually laughed. One short astonished sound, hand flying to her own mouth as if to catch it. Marin did not make a thing of it. She just stored it where she kept the good ones. Julian came home late as he had the night before. The black car ghosting up the drive after June was already down.

Marin found him in the kitchen at the far end. Jacket off, tie loose, eating something cold straight from the container at the counter, like a man who’d forgotten food was a thing you sat down for. The big house ticked around them. Outside the window, the pool light glowed blue and the cicas had given way to the deeper saw of crickets.

She laughed today, Marin said. He went still with the fork halfway up. What? At the pool, a heron landed and stood there looking offended, and she laughed. Marin leaned in the doorway. I figured you’d want to know that more than you’d want to eat whatever that is at midnight. For a moment, Julian Hail didn’t say anything at all. He set the fork down.

He put both hands flat on the cold counter and bowed his head over them, and his shoulders moved once hard, and when he lifted his face, it was wet, and he didn’t bother to hide it, which surprised her more than anything yet. 11 months, he said. It’s been 11 months since I heard that sound. He scrubbed a hand down his face.

Thank you. I don’t There isn’t a Thank you. Don’t thank me. Thank the heron. She crossed to the cupboard, found two glasses, filled them with water from the tap because it gave her hands something to do. Julian, can I ask you something and you not get cold about it? That depends entirely on the question.

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