“Yeah. He is.”
The water laps between us. I look at her in the starlight and feel that pull go taut in my chest again. That dangerous, inconvenient thing that shouldn’t be there at all and I suspect is there forever now.
“What about you?” I ask. “You care a lot about family too.”
She looks down at her hands. “I know what it’s like when someone walks away. So I promised myself I’d never do that. And I always keep my promises.”
“When you took this job, you said you'd take good care of my son. I'd say you've overdelivered on that promise. Jonah's thriving. He's happy as I’ve ever seen him. He adores you.”
Her cheeks go pink and she looks away, but she's smiling. “He's easy to love.”
“So are you.”
Her feet stop their slow kicks. The only sound is the lap of water against the pool edge as she stares at me.
The words are out before I can catch them. Blame it on the whiskey.
Except I meant every word.
Chapter 15
First
WALKER
Itry to play it off casual anyway. “Don’t look so surprised. Nobody ever told you that?”
“No, actually.” A crooked smile. “You’d be the first.”
I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break. But those words, that look in her eyes… that puts a crack right down the middle of it.
This woman who gives everything she has to my son, to her mother, to every person in her orbit, and nobody has ever thought to give her those words back.
The distance between us is down to two feet now. Maybe less. I could reach out and touch her, easy.
“You committed to that job in New York.” My voice is a little rougher now. Testing the waters here. “Is that commitment ironclad?”
Some desperate, reckless part of me wants to know if there's any world in which she stays. If there's any version of thissummer that doesn't end with her driving away and taking whatever's left of my peace of mind with her.
“I signed a contract,” she says.
“Contracts can be broken.” I pause. “What would it take? For you to break it?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers.
I wait. Wait for a tiny sliver of hope to hang on to.
If there’s a future path where she stays, everything changes. She's not the nanny anymore. She's just Sadie. Sadie, the siren, pure temptation beneath the moonlight. Sadie, who just told me nobody has ever called her easy to love, when the truth is I can't imagine how anyone who's spent five minutes with her hasn't said it daily.
I've been holding myself, and her, at arm's length. The reasons were solid when I made them. She's leaving, she works for me, it would be wrong. Every one of those reasons is still technically true.
Every one of them gets harder to remember by the second.
She falls silent. I get the sense there’s a decision being made inside her now, a door opening that she usually keeps closed.
She reaches past me for the whiskey glass again. Her shoulder presses briefly against mine as she does it, warm despite the water, and she stays close when she takes a sip. Close enough that I could count the water droplets on her skin.
“My daddy up and left when I was ten,” she says, not looking at me. “Told Momma the thrill was gone and left with his suitcase and his mistress in our family car. He worked the oil fields and he made the money. When he left, his parting gift was seventy five thousand dollars in gambling debt. We lost everything.”
