Melanie turned her smile on me. “Can I see you in the kitchen, please?”
I dutifully nodded and followed. The temperature in the granite room seemed to drop when Melanie rounded the massive island to face me. I stood on the other side, marking the distance to the back doors and wondering how well I could scale a fence with my sore ankle if I needed to make a quick escape.
My mind always prepared for the worst because most of the time, the worst was what I ended up facing. I reminded myself Melanie didn’t know who I was or anything about the man in the bookstore. She probably only wanted to tell me not to talk to Brittany anymore.
“Are you a danger to my family?” she said and caught me completely off guard. She was in her right to question if I was qualified for childcare, but the way she’d said it, the threat in her question, told me she was asking about something else.
“Excuse me?”
Melanie leveled a steady gaze at me and had a look in her eyes I had not seen before. “Listen. I know you aren’t who you say you are. I knew you were a plant before I hired you. I need a new nanny, and a perfect one just drops into my lap at the same time a secret agent starts sniffing around? I know you are working with him. This welcome wagon bit has only served to reel you in. Keep your enemies closer, right? I also know you don’t have enough to arrest me, or you would have done it by now. If I thought you or that agent was a real threat, I wouldn’t have let you in my house.”
I fought to keep my mouth from falling open and barely succeeded. “Um, I don’t know what you’re—”
Melanie’s lips thinned into a flat line. “I’m not a fool, Lauren. And I know that’s not your name, but I haven’t been able to find your real one. Whatever you’ve got going on, that part is tight.”
I felt as if I’d been punched. I gripped the island so I didn’t fall over and took a step back to steady myself.
“What I don’t know,” Melanie went on, “is if there’s more going on than you trying to infiltrate my life. You’re here for two days and your uncle suddenly dies, you’ve got some kind of secret relationship with my old nanny, you obviously have no experience with children—”
“Hey—” I began to protest, thinking I’d been doing a decent job.
She held up a hand. “I wasn’t finished. There’s also an unmarked car surveilling our street, and you show up to work limping today. It all makes me wonder just what side of the law you are on. Are they forcing you to do this?”
I continued gaping. In all the times I’d had my cover blown, it had never happened so calmly and to my face. The standard—though rare—scenarios usually involved shouting and threats, guns and escape. Never had I been quietly standing insomeone’s immaculate kitchen next to a fruit bowl while my fabricated world unraveled around me. I could not comprehend what was happening. Who had slipped? Me? Bray? Wallace? Or perhaps Melanie was just that good.
I thought for a moment of denying everything. Of asking if she were feeling all right for having come up with such a wild story about her perfectly innocent new nanny. Perhaps she bumped her head on the Peloton or was fever dreaming. But given the obvious depth of her research—to infiltrate a cover story miles deep—and the very real threat on my life,and, not to mention the fact that Melanie would probably kill me with a serving spoon for putting her family in harm’s way, I decided to go with a version of the truth.
“You’re right. I’m not here entirely willfully, and you don’t know who I really am. And for everyone’s best interest, it needs to stay that way.”
She stared at me so intently, I felt like I was being X-rayed. Her eyebrow twitched and her jaw clenched. What she was considering, I could only imagine: calling the police; where she would dump my body when she killed me. With all the hardened criminals I’d dealt with, never would I have thought the Queen of Suburbia would be my demise.
To my surprise, her rigid gaze softened around the edges. A moment passed between us, something unspoken but profound, where I got the sudden sense we were equals.
“How much trouble are you in?” She said it less as an accusation and more like a concern she could relate to.
Knowing shecouldrelate to it, and looking for any way to keep the upper hand in this conversation before it completely derailed, I countered with, “Probably as much as you are in. I know about Montrose.”
Her face morphed into shock before settling into a clearly feigned calmness. She roughly cleared her throat. “And what exactly do you know?”
“That you’re in enough debt to have put a lien on your house. What was in that seized shipment?”
At this, her face completely drained of color.
“Did you trust the wrong guy? Because I sure as hell know what that’s like.” I kept pushing, thinking of my father, and to some extent, Wallace.
Melanie looked like the truth was ready to leap from her tongue, but she wouldn’t let it. I was apparently more of a threat than she’d realized. But perhaps not entirely a threat, based on the look on her face. Maybe more of an equal, and from what I could tell, that scared her even more.
“Look, I know you don’t trust me, but maybe there’s a way we could—”
“You need to leave.” She cut off my offer.
“But I—”
“Get out!” she snapped. The threat in her voice was ice-cold, and I knew if I stayed, things would get ugly. She knew we didn’t have enough to arrest her, otherwise DSA agents would have been swarming the place. And given her knife block full of stainless-steel blades sitting about a foot away, the Brownings’ house was no longer a safe harbor for me.
Out of options, I turned to leave. In a state of shock that my cover had been blown, I headed for the front door. The ache in my ankle throbbed with each step and I had the sudden and embarrassing urge to cry.
It had all been fake. As someone who lied for a living, it shouldn’t have hurt at all, but I’d thought the moms had actually liked me. That they’d genuinely been welcoming me into their world, but it had all been a scheme to keep tabs on me. They had known from the very start I wasn’t who I said I was. And that was mostly Bray’s fault for being so obvious.
