2. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The study smells like old books and older money.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with leather spines, a desk wide enough to land a plane on, windows that look out over the water like the ocean is something he owns too.
Probably he does. Probably there’s a deed somewhere in one of those drawers that says Lippitt on it, and underneath, everything you can see from here.
Callum Lippitt does not sit.
He stands at the window with his back to me, hands in his pockets, looking out at that water like it has answers he’s still waiting for. The afternoon light catches the edge of his profile - sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, the kind of face that photographs well and gives nothing away.
I shouldn’t be looking at the breadth of his shoulders, silhouetted against all that gray light. I shouldn’t be noticing that he’s taken off his watch and left it on the desk, that there’s something almost vulnerable about the bare skin of his wrist.
“Qualifications,” he says, interrupting my thoughts.
“None you’d recognize.”
That gets me half a second of his attention. He turns his head just enough that I can see the corner of his mouth, that almost-smile still threatening.
“References.”
“My landlord thinks I’m reliable. My brother thinks I’m annoying.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
“I know exactly how funny my life is, Mr. Lippitt.” I stay where I am, just inside the door, because I wasn’t invited to sit and I’ll be damned if I’ll stand in the middle of his office like a supplicant waiting for judgment. “It’s not.”
He turns then, giving me his full attention for the first time since the hallway.
His eyes are gray in this light, or maybe blue - the color of the ocean on a cloudy day, when you can’t tell where the water ends and the sky begins.
They move over my face like he’s reading something written there, something I didn’t know I was showing.
“Why do you want this job?”
And I could lie. I could give him the polished answer, the one about passion for childcare and belief in early development and all the pretty words the other twelve women probably rehearsed in their mirrors this morning.
But I am so tired. Tired of pretending. Tired of performing.
Tired of standing in rooms full of people who have never once had to choose between groceries and gas.
“My brother is sick.”
The words come out flat and plain, nothing fancy about them. Just the truth, ugly and unvarnished.
“The treatment costs more than I will make in twenty years. Everyone out there wants this job.” I gesture toward the door, toward the hallway full of Yale degrees and master’s theses. “I need it. If that disqualifies me, disqualify me and I’ll leave, because I’ve got a bus to catch.”
The silence that follows is different from the one in the hall. This one has weight to it. Shape.
Callum Lippitt looks at me differently than the first time I walked through his door and something in his expression shifts. I can’t read it. I don’t know what it means. But it’s there, and it’s new, and he doesn’t try to hide it.
“How sick?” he asks.
“Sick enough that I’m standing in your office instead of sitting by his bed.”
“What kind of treatment?”
“The kind I can’t afford.”
He opens his mouth to say something else - another question, maybe, or the dismissal I’ve been waiting for since I walked in - but before he can speak, the door behind me pushes open.
I turn.
Olivia.
The same dark hair, the same mismatched socks, the same one-eared rabbit dragging on the floor behind her. She slips through the gap in the doorway like she’s made of smoke, and for a moment I think she’s looking for her father.
She’s not.
She finds me across the room the way you find a familiar face in a crowd of strangers - immediately, instinctively, like she knew exactly where I would be.
And her whole body changes. Her shoulders drop.
Her chin comes up. The tight, watchful look I saw in the hallway softens into something that almost looks like relief.
She crosses to me. Not to the man by the window, not to the desk, not to any of the expensive furniture that probably has its own insurance policy.
To me. I don’t remember sinking into the chair by the door, but I must have, because when she reaches me she doesn’t stop - she climbs into my lap like we’ve done this a hundred times before, like the conversation only paused for a moment and now she’s back to finish it.
“Hi,” she says. Matter-of-fact. Like this is perfectly normal.
I freeze.
My arms don’t know what to do. My hands hover at my sides, useless, because I cannot just - I cannot just hold someone else’s child like she belongs there.
But she settles against me like she’s found the one comfortable spot in the whole cold house, and something in my chest turns over so hard it hurts.
I don’t have a name for it.
I don’t let go of her either.
“Olivia,” Callum says. His voice has an edge to it now, something between surprise and warning. “We’ve talked about interrupting.”
Olivia puts her head on my shoulder. Her hair smells like baby shampoo and something sweeter underneath, something that’s just her.
“I want her to stay and play with me,” she says.
She sounds confident and sure, the way only children can be sure.
I watch her father’s face over the top of her head. I watch the words land, watch them hit something he wasn’t expecting. His jaw tightens. His hands come out of his pockets, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with them, so they just hang there at his sides, empty.
“Olivia,” he says again, but there’s no force behind it now.
“I want her.” She turns her face into my neck. Her small fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt. “She talked to me about Rabbit.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t just-”
“I like her and I want her to play with me and Rabbit.”
The room goes quiet.
Callum Lippitt is looking at his daughter like he’s seeing something he’s never seen before, and his daughter is holding onto me like I’m the only solid thing in a world made of water, and I am sitting in a billionaire’s study with no qualifications to my name and a child in my arms who chose me for reasons I don’t understand.
“She never does that,” he says. Not to me. To himself, maybe, or to the room, or to whatever god watches over men who have everything except the one thing they actually need. “Not with anyone.”
Olivia’s breathing has slowed against my shoulder. Her grip has loosened. She’s not asleep, but she’s close to it, that boneless heaviness of a child who has finally stopped waiting for something.
I don’t know how long we stay like that. Long enough for the light through the windows to shift. Long enough for my legs to start falling asleep under her weight. Long enough for Callum Lippitt to make some kind of decision behind those gray-blue eyes that I’ll probably never be told about.
Finally, he moves. He crosses to the door and pulls it open, and the clipboard woman is there immediately, like she was waiting just outside.
“Mr. Lippitt, I have the next-”
“Send the rest home.”
She blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“The other candidates. Send them home.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. “We’re done.”
“Sir, I don’t-”
“Now, please.”
She looks past him to me - to Olivia in my arms, to the scene that makes no sense by any logic she understands - and her mouth opens and closes and opens again. But she doesn’t argue. She just nods once, sharply, and disappears.
The door closes behind her.
Callum turns back to face me. His daughter is a warm, heavy weight against my chest, and his eyes move between us like he’s solving an equation he didn’t expect.
“You don’t have any qualifications,” he says.
“No.”
“You have no experience with children of means.”
“I have experience with children who need things.” I keep my voice low, careful not to wake the girl in my arms. “The amount of money attached doesn’t change what they need.”
“And what do they need, in your professional opinion?”
“Someone who shows up.”
He stares at me for a long moment. Then he reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a folder - thick, official-looking, the kind of thing that has lawyers’ signatures inside it.
“The position comes with room and board. Your salary will be deposited on the first of each month. You’ll have Sundays off, unless Olivia requests otherwise.
” He sets the folder on the edge of the desk, closer to me than to him.
“If you need an advance, speak to the house manager. If you need anything for my daughter, you have my authority to acquire it. If anyone on my staff gives you trouble, you come directly to me.”
I can’t move. Olivia is heavy in my arms and my heart is pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my throat, and I cannot make any of this make sense.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I manage.
“I know my daughter walked past twelve qualified women to get to you.” He sits on the edge of his desk, arms crossed, watching me.
“I know she hasn’t let anyone hold her like that since we lost the last nanny.
I know I’ve been looking for someone for two years, and you walked in here with wet shoes and told me I didn’t know what you were. ”
“That’s not-”
“It’s enough.” He nods toward the folder. “Take the night. Read the terms. If you have questions, the house manager will answer them. If you want to negotiate, you can try, but I should tell you that I don’t.”
Olivia stirs against my shoulder. Her eyes flutter open, and for a moment she looks confused - where am I, who is this, why is everything so strange - and then she sees my face and settles again.
“Are you staying?” she asks. Her voice is thick with almost-sleep. “Are you staying forever?”
I look at her father. He looks back at me. And I understand, suddenly, that this isn’t really a job interview anymore. This is something else entirely. A test I didn’t know I was taking. A door I didn’t know was open.
“I’m staying for a while,” I tell her.
“That’s not the same.”
“No,” I agree. “It’s not.”
But it’s a start. It’s more than I had when I walked in here. And tomorrow I’ll call the hospital and ask about payment plans, and I’ll do the math again, and maybe this time the numbers will work.
Olivia’s hand finds mine. Her small fingers wrap around two of mine, holding on.
“Okay,” she says. “A while is okay.”
Behind us, Callum Lippitt makes a sound I can’t identify. When I glance at him, his face has gone carefully blank again, all that strange openness from before tucked away behind the mask he shows the world.
But his eyes are still on his daughter’s hand in mine. And there’s something in them that looks almost like hope.