4. Callum
— ? —
Callum
I come home to screaming.
It hits me the moment the door opens - that sound, high and ragged and animal, the sound of a child coming apart at the seams. I’ve heard it before. I’ve heard it too many times. But it never gets easier, never becomes something I can brace for.
Olivia is on the floor of the front hall, rigid, her back arched, her face red and wet with tears that don’t stop coming.
The rabbit is three feet away, thrown or dropped, its single ear bent at a terrible angle.
The staff are hovering - Maria from the kitchen, Diego who manages the grounds, two others whose names I’ve forgotten - all of them wearing the same expression of helpless alarm.
“How long?” I ask, already shrugging out of my coat.
“Twenty minutes.” Maria’s hands are twisted together in front of her. “She was fine, sir, she was perfectly fine, and then-”
“Did something happen?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. One minute she was playing, the next-”
Another scream tears through the hall, and I stop listening.
I crouch down on the marble floor in my four-thousand-dollar coat and I say her name. “Olivia. Olivia, sweetheart. I’m here. I’m home.”
She screams louder.
I reach for her and she jerks away, her whole body rejecting the touch, and I pull my hands back like I’ve been burned.
This is the worst part. This is always the worst part - the reaching and the rejection, the wanting to help and the knowing that I can’t, that nothing I do makes any difference, that my own daughter doesn’t want me anywhere near her when she’s like this.
Three nannies in two years. Each one promised she had training, experience, methods. Each one lasted less than six months before the episodes drove them away. The screaming. The rigidity. The way she can go from fine to shattered in the space of a heartbeat, with no warning and no explanation.
I don’t know how to fix it.
I don’t know how to fix her.
I don’t know how to fix anything that matters.
“Sir.” Diego, at my elbow. “Perhaps if we-”
“Give her space.” It’s the only thing I know how to do. The only thing that sometimes works. “Everyone back off. Give her room.”
They retreat, grateful for the instruction, and I stay where I am, kneeling on the marble six feet from my daughter, watching her scream herself hoarse. My chest feels like it’s full of broken glass.
Then I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Slow. Unhurried. Nothing like the panicked shuffle of the staff.
The new girl - Nichole - comes down into the front hall like she’s taking a walk in a garden.
Her eyes move over the scene: Olivia on the floor, me kneeling helplessly, the staff clustered by the door.
She doesn’t look alarmed. She doesn’t look uncertain.
She looks like someone who has seen this before, or something like it.
She walks past me without a word.
“What are you-” I start, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t acknowledge me, just keeps moving until she’s beside Olivia, and then she does something none of the others ever thought to do.
She sits down on the floor.
Not reaching. Not touching. Not trying to fix anything.
Just there.
“You don’t have to stop,” she says, and her voice is low and steady, pitched under the screaming like a current beneath a wave. “I’m not going anywhere while you do it.”
Olivia’s screams don’t stop. But something in them changes - a hitch, a hesitation, like a radio signal briefly interrupted.
Nichole doesn’t move. She doesn’t try to touch.
She just sits there on the cold marble floor, her hands open in her lap, her breathing slow and deliberate.
There’s something practiced about it, something trained - the level voice, the open posture, the way she seems to be breathing on purpose, like she’s offering a rhythm for someone else to borrow.
I watch from six feet away, frozen, as the woman I hired less than two days ago does the thing I have never once managed.
Eleven minutes.
I count them. I count every single one, because I don’t know what else to do with myself while I stand here in this hallway being useless.
Eleven minutes of sitting and waiting and breathing, and slowly, so slowly, the screaming becomes crying, and the crying becomes hiccups, and the hiccups become silence.
Olivia crawls into Nichole’s lap.
Just like in the study. Just like before. She crawls in and buries her face in Nichole’s shoulder and goes boneless, and Nichole wraps her arms around her and holds on, and I watch my daughter’s body finally, finally relax.
Something is happening in my chest that I don’t have a name for, something that might be relief or might be grief or might be something else entirely.
I have spent two years trying to crack the code of these episodes.
I have spent two years reading books and consulting specialists and lying awake at night wondering what I’m doing wrong.
And this woman, this stranger with the wet shoes and the defiant chin, just solved it by sitting down and staying.
I find myself looking at her, at the curve of her neck where her hair has fallen aside.
At her hands, steady and certain on my daughter’s back.
At the way she breathes, the gentle rise and fall of her body, the shape of her so close and warm and living that I feel it pull at something deep in my chest. She’s holding my child, and all I can think is how badly I want her closer still.
She’s in yesterday’s clothes, rumpled from sleep, not a trace of makeup on her face, and something in my chest does a slow, dangerous turn that I refuse to examine.
I don’t move.
I can’t move.
The staff have disappeared. I didn’t notice them go. It’s just the three of us now, in the marble hall, in the afternoon light, and I should say something but I don’t know what.
Nichole looks up.
Our eyes meet over my daughter’s head, and there’s something in her expression that I can’t read - not judgment, not triumph, something softer and more complicated than either.
“She’s okay,” she says quietly. “She just needed someone to not leave.”
I should respond. I should thank her. I should do something other than stand here like a statue while a woman I’m paying teaches me how to parent my own child.
“She’s tired,” Nichole continues. “I’m going to take her upstairs. Put her down for a nap.”
“Yes.” The word comes out rough. “Yes, that’s - yes.”
She stands, Olivia still clinging to her like a koala, and walks past me toward the stairs. She doesn’t look at me again. She doesn’t need to. The lesson has already been taught.
I find her in the hallway two hours later.
She’s coming out of Olivia’s room, pulling the door closed behind her with the careful slowness of someone who doesn’t want to wake a sleeping child. When she sees me, she doesn’t startle. She just waits.
“How did you do that?” The question has been burning in me since the screaming stopped. “The - what you did. How?”
“I didn’t do anything.” She leans against the wall, arms crossed. Not defensive. Just tired. “I just didn’t leave.”
“Everyone leaves.”
The words come out before I can stop them, and I hear the bitterness in them, the years of nannies and housekeepers and relatives who promised they’d be there and weren’t. I hear the accusation, too, the one I’m always making without meaning to: everyone leaves, so why should you be any different?
Nichole doesn’t flinch.
“Yeah,” she says. “She knows.”
It lands like a blade under my ribs, clean and precise.
Because she’s right. Of course she’s right.
Olivia knows better than anyone how people leave.
She’s been watching them do it her whole life - the nannies who couldn’t handle the episodes, the specialists who gave up, the father who keeps showing up but never quite stays.
“You should get some sleep,” I manage. “She’ll probably be out until morning.”
Nichole nods. She pushes off the wall, turns toward her room. Then she stops.
“She loves you, you know.” She says it without turning around. “She watches for your car every day. She told me.”
“I know she does.”
“Then act like it.”
She walks away before I can respond. Her door closes. The hallway goes quiet.
I stand there for a long time, thinking about windows and waiting and all the ways a man can be present without actually being there.
Later that night, after I’ve gone through the motions of dinner and email and all the hollow rituals that fill my evenings, I find myself outside Olivia’s door again.
The house is dark. The staff have gone to their quarters.
It’s just me and the shadows and the sound of my daughter breathing on the other side of the wall.
I open the door.
Just a crack. Just enough to see her - curled on her side, rabbit tucked under her chin, her face slack and peaceful in sleep.
Nichole is there too, sitting in the chair by the window, a book open in her lap.
She looks up when the door opens, but she doesn’t speak. Just watches me watching my daughter.
And then Olivia’s voice, sleep-thick and barely audible:
“Nichole?”
“I’m here, baby.”
“Don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
A pause. Then, quieter still, almost too soft to hear:
“Do you think my daddy loves me?”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I don’t wait for the answer. I can’t. I’m already backing away from the door, pulling it closed, retreating down the hallway with my hand over my mouth because if I stay one second longer I’m going to make a sound I can’t take back.
My daughter is asking a stranger whether her father loves her.
My daughter doesn’t know.
I make it to my study before the tears come. I lock the door and stand at the window. When I finally stop, when I finally wipe my face and try to breathe like a normal person, I realize I’m not thinking about my daughter anymore.
I’m thinking about the woman who held her.
About the way she said I’m not going anywhere like it was a promise she intended to keep. About the way my daughter looked at her - looked for her - like she’d been waiting her whole life for exactly this person to walk through the door.
I have hired a stranger to take care of my child, and somehow that stranger has become the only fixed point in my entire household.
The only person I keep circling back to with a kind of hungry, helpless focus: her voice, her scent, the quiet strength in her body, the way I can’t stop wanting her hands to be on me the same careful way they were on my daughter.
I don’t know what to do with her at all.