2. Taryn
TARYN
The espresso machine at Brielle's place has been wheezing like an old dog since six this morning, and I've been bargaining with it the whole shift.
"Come on, baby," I mutter, slapping the side of it the way you'd burp a colicky infant.
"Just give me one clean shot for the man in the blazer and I'll have you serviced, I swear on my mama. "
"You've been swearing on your mama for three weeks," Brielle says, sliding past me with a tray of cardamom buns balanced on one hand.
She's wearing a mustard-yellow wrap dress that has no business looking that good before noon, gold hoops big enough to dunk a basketball through, and a smile she aims at the customers like a weapon.
"That machine's gonna outlive both of us.
You okay? You've got your bill face on."
"I don't have a bill face."
"You've got the face. The one where you're doing math behind your eyes and the math is winning." She sets the tray down and lowers her voice so the morning crowd can't hear. "How bad is it, Tary?"
I wipe down the steam wand instead of answering, because the honest number is the kind that makes a person flinch, and Brielle worries enough as it is.
Rent was due four days ago. My landlord left a voicemail this morning in that clipped, sorrowful tone people use when they’re trying to stay reasonable but running out of room.
There’s a stack of envelopes on my kitchen counter I’ve started calling “the situation,” and the situation has been growing like something in a petri dish.
"I'll figure it out," I tell her. "I always figure it out."
"That's not a number."
"It's a philosophy." I hand the blazer guy his Americano and flash him the smile that's gotten me out of more late fees than I'd like to admit. "Have a beautiful day, sir."
My phone buzzes against my hip right as the lunch rush starts thinning. It's the agency — Patricia from placement, who only ever calls when something's gone sideways or something's gone lucrative. I duck into the back by the flour sacks and the walk-in cooler and press the phone to my ear.
"Taryn, sweetheart, are you sitting down?
" Patricia always opens like she's about to either fire you or change your life.
"I have a live-in. Temporary, could go longer.
One child, six years old, and the family is—" she pauses, and I can hear her choosing the word "—prominent.
Very. The pay is double your usual rate.
Double, Taryn. Plus room and board, which means no rent for however long it runs. "
The word rent lands somewhere in my chest and squeezes. "What's the catch? There's always a catch with the double-rate ones."
"The child recently lost her mother. She's not speaking. Three of our people have already come and gone—they couldn't reach her, and the household is..." Another pause. "Intense. The guardian is a businessman. Demanding. But you're the best I've got with the hard ones, and I thought of you first."
I lean my head back against the cold metal of the cooler door and breathe.
I have spent a career walking into mansions full of children who treat the help like furniture and parents who treat their children the same way.
The last rich family I worked for had a six-year-old who called me by the wrong name on purpose for two months and a mother who docked my pay for "emotional overinvolvement," which is apparently a sin when you hug a crying kid.
I swore I was done with that world. I told Brielle I'd rather pour coffee until my hands fell off.
But a grieving little girl who won't talk is a different animal than a brat. And double rent-free is not a number I get to be proud about.
"Send me the address,"
The building is the kind that has a doorman who looks at my secondhand coat like it might be contagious.
The elevator opens straight into the apartment — no hallway, no door, just the whoosh and suddenly I'm standing in the middle of the most expensive nothing I've ever seen.
Gray stone, gray glass, furniture that looks like it was designed to be admired rather than sat on.
The whole place is silent in a way that isn't peaceful.
It's the silence of a house holding its breath.
An older woman meets me, silver threading through her dark hair, an apron over a neat cardigan.
"You must be Taryn," she says, and her relief is so plain it's almost funny.
"I'm Helena. I keep this place running, for whatever that's worth lately.
" She glances down a long corridor and her voice drops.
"I'll be honest with you, because I think you'd rather have honest. We've all been walking on broken glass for a week.
That poor baby won't eat, won't speak, won't let anyone near her.
And Mr. Whitlock—" She stops herself, presses her lips together.
"He's doing his best. He just doesn't know what his best is supposed to look like. "
Before I can ask what she means, he walks in.
I know the type before he opens his mouth — the suit alone tells the whole story, dark and severe and clearly worth more than my car.
Tall, broad through the shoulders, dark hair combed back without a strand out of place.
Gray eyes that take inventory of me in about a second and a half and file me somewhere under temporary, replaceable.
He's handsome in the way a closed door is handsome.
There's exhaustion underneath it, though, dragging at the corners of him, and I clock it the way I clock a fever on a kid before they admit they feel sick.
"Ms. Cole." He doesn't offer his hand. "I'll keep this brief.
Chloe wakes at seven. Breakfast at half past. Quiet activities until ten, outdoor time only with my prior approval, lights out by eight.
The staff aren't to be disturbed during working hours, and I'd ask that you keep your interactions with my work calls to an absolute minimum.
There's a binder in the kitchen with the rest."
"A binder," I repeat.
"It's thorough." He says it like that's a kindness he's doing me.
“I’m sure it is.” My tone stays even, but a small, stubborn pilot light has already caught. “Mr. Whitlock, can I ask you one thing before I read your binder?”
The faint downward shift of his brow tells me nobody asks him things. "Go on."
"What does Chloe like? Not the schedule — her. Favorite color, favorite story, the snack she begs for. What makes her her."
And there it is. The pause. He looks at me, and for half a second the door cracks and I see the man behind it — lost, scared down to the bone, a person who has clearly been Googling "how to talk to a grieving child" at three in the morning and finding nothing that fits in a binder.
Then it closes again. "I don't have that information yet," he says, stiff as a man reciting a deposition. "I'd assumed that was your area."
"It is," I say gently. "I just wanted to know if it was yours too."
He doesn't answer that. But as I'm following Helena toward the back, I catch him out of the corner of my eye — hovering at the mouth of the corridor where a small bedroom door sits ajar, leaning toward it the way you lean toward a fire you're afraid to touch, then making himself turn away.
A man pretending with his whole body that he doesn't care, doing it badly, because the caring is leaking out of every seam.
Chloe is sitting on the floor of her too-big gray room with her back against the bed, a worn stuffed rabbit clamped under her chin. Dark curls, serious little face, eyes the same cloud-gray as her uncle's. She doesn't look up when I come in. I don't make her.
"Hey, sweet pea," I say, and I lower myself down onto the carpet a respectful few feet away, no sudden moves, like I'm sitting near a deer.
"I'm Taryn. I'm not gonna make you talk.
I'm just gonna sit right here, and if you want company, I've got plenty, and if you don't, that's allowed too.
" I pull my knees up. "That's a good rabbit. He looks like he gives solid advice."
Nothing. But she doesn't move away either, and I count that as the opening bid.
We sit like that as the light through the floor-to-ceiling windows goes gold and then gray.
Helena brings dinner; Chloe doesn't touch it.
I don't push. When it's time for bed I help her into pajamas with the careful narration I use on the wary ones — arms up, there we go, you're doing great — and I tuck the comforter around her and set the rabbit by her cheek.
"Goodnight, Coco," I say, trying the nickname Helena mentioned. "I'll be right out there. Holler if you need me. Or don't holler. Just think real loud and I'll probably hear it."
I'm halfway to standing when a small hand slips into mine.
It's nothing — five cold little fingers curling around two of mine, a grip so light I could break it by breathing wrong.
She still doesn't look at me. She just holds on, in the dark, to the first stranger who didn't ask her to perform her grief on a schedule.
And I sink right back down onto the floor beside her bed, rent and binders and every promise I made about never doing this again dissolving like sugar in hot coffee.
"Okay," I whisper, mostly to myself. "Okay. I'm not going anywhere."