“Me?” Emma looks delighted by this. “I get to be on the list?”
“You’re the most important thing of all,” I say, and I mean it.
She beams at me, and then we spend the next fifteen minutes coloring the list—Emma insisting that each item needs its own color, that dogs should be brown and flowers should be pink and taxis should be yellow obviously. She draws little pictures next to some of the words, adding wobbly wheels to the bicycle and petals to the flower.
By the time we’re done, the list is bright and colorful and completely Emma, and she’s holding it like it’s a treasure map.
“Can we go now?” she asks, already standing up. “Can we start looking?”
I glance at the clock on the microwave. It’s not even eleven yet, which means we have the whole afternoon ahead of us.
“Sure,” I say, folding the list carefully and tucking it into my pocket. “Let’s go find some stuff.”
Emma cheers and I stand there in Leo’s kitchen watching her hunt for her shoes under the couch, listening to her narrate her search (“They’re not under here…wait, is that my sock? No, that’s Dad’s sock, gross…”), and I realize I haven’t thought about my parents or Daniel or the wedding I ran away from in hours.
I’ll take it.
Chapter 10
LEO
Stanley’s stationed at the front desk like always, bent over the sports section with a pencil wedged between his fingers and his reading glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. The lobby is quiet except for the faint hum of the elevator cables and the occasional hiss of rain against the glass doors. He’s got that look—the one he wears when the crossword puzzle has him cornered. His brow is furrowed deep, lips pressed together in concentration, and his thumb is worrying the eraser end of the pencil like he’s trying to summon an answer through sheer friction.
“Evening, Professor,” he murmurs, not looking up. Which is how I know he’s truly stumped. When Stanley’s stuck, the whole world could walk through that revolving door and he wouldn’t register a thing until he’d filled in that final square.
“Evening, Stanley.”
He taps the pencil against the newsprint, a soft percussive rhythm. “You’re good with words, yeah?” He doesn’t wait for confirmation. “Seven letters. ‘Pertaining to the stars.’”
“Stellar.”
He writes it in immediately, the graphite scratching against paper, and then he lifts his head and his whole face rearrangesitself. That delighted grin emerges from beneath years of creases and silver stubble, crinkling the corners of his eyes, transforming him from a man doing his job into someone who’s just solved a small but meaningful mystery.
“That’s it! That’s the one!” He sets the pencil down with ceremony. “You’re a lifesaver, Professor. I was sitting here chewing on ‘astral’ for the better part of fifteen minutes, but that’s six letters and it wasn’t sitting right with the down clues. You ever have that? When a word’s almost right but your gut tells you it’s not?”
“Every day,” I say.
He chuckles, that warm rumbling sound that seems to originate somewhere behind his sternum. Then he folds the newspaper with careful, practiced motions—a man who’s handled paper for decades—and sets it aside. His hand reaches into the little ceramic bowl he keeps perpetually full on the corner of his desk, that inexplicable cornucopia of hard candies that no one has ever seen him replenish but which never runs empty. Gold foil wrappers catch the lobby light as his fingers sift through the assortment.
He extracts a Werther’s Original with the precision of a surgeon. “For the little miss,” he says, holding it out to me with that same crinkled grin. “Tell her Stanley says hello.”
I take the candy, feel its weight in my palm. “I always do.”
“I know you do.” He settles back into his chair, the leather creaking beneath him. “She’s a good kid, that one. Got spirit. You keep her spirited, you hear me? Don’t let nobody dull that shine.”
That’s one way to put it, I think, but I just smile and pocket the candy. “Have a good weekend, Stanley.”
“You too, Professor. You too.”
I take the elevator up to the fourth floor, and as the numbers tick by I realize I’m actually excited about this weekend in a wayI haven’t been in months. It’s Friday, which means two full days with Emma. I’m planning to take her to Blockbuster tomorrow and let her rent whatever VHS tapes she wants—probablyThe Little Mermaidagain, she never gets tired of that one, and maybe something new if she’s feeling adventurous. Tonight we’re doing pizza, her choice of toppings, and I’m not going to fight her if she wants pineapple even though pineapple on pizza is objectively wrong.
I’ve missed her. I know I see her every evening and every weekend, but I miss her all the same. I miss her questions, the ones that come rapid-fire and unannounced:Do worms have birthdays? Who decided which letters go together?I miss the gap in her front teeth when she smiles, that little window she’ll grow out of someday but hasn’t yet.
But here’s what’s surprised me this week—I haven’t been worried. Not the way I was with the other nannies, where I’d spend the entire day bracing for a phone call telling me that there’s been an incident, that Emma had done something terrible or that they were quitting, effective immediately. But Annie’s done spectacularly well these last couple days. Better than well, actually. And Emma’s been…different.
Not drastically different, not like she’s suddenly a completely new kid, but there are small changes. She’s been less explosive in the evenings. Usually when I come home she’s wound up and testy, ready to argue about bedtime or dinner or whatever arbitrary thing has set her off. But this week she’s been calmer, more regulated. Still Emma—still stubborn, still opinionated, still occasionally difficult—but without that hair-trigger quality she’s had since Rebecca left.
And she talks about Annie constantly.
