6. Chapter 5
Liv Strauss
The binder hit the recycling bin with a satisfying thunk.
Missy looked up from her spot at the kitchen table, eyes wide. "What was that?"
"Nothing important." I dusted my hands and grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door. "Come on. We're going outside."
"But Papa left that for me to look at."
"Your papa left a hundred and twelve pages of after-school activities organized by cognitive development stage." I held up her jacket. "You know what's better for cognitive development? Fresh air and dirt."
Missy slid off her chair slowly, like she wasn't sure this was allowed. "Mrs. Thurston said dirt has germs."
"Mrs. Thurston isn't here anymore, is she?"
A tiny smile cracked through. Missy took her jacket.
The park was three blocks from Zoltan's Upper West Side townhouse, a patch of green wedged between buildings that likely cost gazillions.
The late afternoon sun slanted through the trees, catching the last of the autumn leaves in shades of amber and rust. Missy walked beside me with her hand in mine, her grip tighter than necessary, like she thought I might disappear if she let go.
I knew that grip. I'd had it myself at her age, clinging to Piper during Mom's bad stretches, afraid to blink.
"Can we feed the ducks?" Missy asked.
"There aren't any ducks."
"There might be."
"If there are ducks, we'll feed them. If there aren't, we'll find something else."
She seemed to accept this logic. We found a bench near a small playground, the metal equipment gleaming in the fading light. A few other kids ran around, their laughter sharp and bright. Missy watched them without moving.
"You can go play," I said.
"I don't know them."
"You don't have to know someone to go down a slide."
She considered this with the gravity of a six-year-old philosopher. "What if they don't like me?"
"Then they're idiots."
Her eyes went wide. "You said a bad word."
"I said a descriptive word. There's a difference." I nudged her shoulder gently. "Go. I'll be right here."
Missy took three steps toward the playground, stopped, looked back at me.
I gave her a thumbs up. She took four more steps.
Stopped again. I made a shooing motion with my hands.
Finally, she reached the edge of the sandbox and stood there, uncertain, until a girl with pigtails handed her a shovel without a word.
Kids were better at this than adults.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and saw Zoltan's name on the screen. Not a text. A call.
I answered with: "She's fine. No broken bones. No kidnapping. No spontaneous combustion."
A pause. Then his voice, that low rumble with the faint Hungarian edge that did something inconvenient to my pulse. "That binder represented twelve hours of research."
"I know. Petra told me when she dropped it off." I watched Missy dig a hole with her borrowed shovel, her brow furrowed in concentration. "You know what else Petra told me? That Missy hasn't been to a playground in two months."
"Her schedule has been—"
"Packed with enrichment activities. I saw the calendar. Music appreciation on Monday. Junior coding on Tuesday. Art therapy on Wednesday." I leaned back against the bench. "She's six, Zoltan. She needs to eat dirt and scrape her knees."
"Eat dirt?"
"It builds immune systems. Look it up."
Another pause. I could picture him in his office, phone pressed to his ear, that little furrow between his brows that appeared when someone didn't follow his carefully constructed logic. I'd been seeing that furrow a lot lately.
"Is she actually eating dirt?"
"No. She's eating a leaf."
Silence.
"Relax," I said. "It's the non-toxic kind. I checked."
"You checked?"
"I'm not a monster. I Googled it first."
Through the phone, I heard what might have been a breath of laughter. Or might have been a sigh. With Zoltan, it was hard to tell. "I'll be home by six."
"Your calendar says seven thirty."
"I'll be home by six."
He hung up before I could respond.
I stared at my phone for a moment, then shoved it back in my pocket.
Across the playground, Missy had abandoned the shovel and was now inspecting a rock with the intensity of a geologist discovering a new mineral formation.
The girl with pigtails had moved on to the swings, but Missy didn't seem to notice.
She was fully absorbed in whatever secrets the rock was telling her.
Missy wandered over eventually, her pockets bulging with treasures. Rocks, mostly. A few leaves. Something that might have been a bottle cap.
"I found these," she announced, dumping them on the bench beside me.
"Very nice. What's this one?" I picked up a grey stone with white streaks.
"That's a moon rock."
"From the moon?"
"From this park's moon." She said it like I was being deliberately obtuse. "Every park has its own moon."
"I did not know that."
"Now you do."
I bit back a smile. "Thank you for educating me."
"You're welcome." She began sorting her collection, placing each item in a specific arrangement that made sense only to her. "Liv?"
"Yeah?"
"Why doesn't Papa come to the park?"
The question landed like a punch. I kept my face neutral. "He's busy with work."
"He's always busy with work."
"He has a lot of people depending on him."
Missy placed a leaf between two rocks, adjusting its position with surgical precision. "I depend on him."
Shit. What was I supposed to say to that? I wasn't her mother. I wasn't even her official nanny. I was a bartender who happened to be good at counting change and distracting small children from their grief.
"He loves you," I said finally. "You know that, right?"
Missy didn't answer. She finished her arrangement, studied it for a moment, then carefully scooped everything back into her pockets.
"Can we go home now? I want to show Papa my moon rock."
Zoltan was already in the kitchen when we got back.
He stood at the counter, phone in hand, sleeves rolled to his elbows in that way that made him look like an ad for expensive watches.
Except his smartwatch was sitting on the counter instead of on his wrist, which was unusual.
His jacket hung over a chair instead of in the closet, which was more unusual.
His tie was loosened, the top button of his shirt undone.
Something had happened. I couldn't tell if it was good or bad.
"Papa!" Missy ran to him, her pockets rattling with park treasures. "I found a moon rock!"
Zoltan crouched down to her level, which did something complicated to my chest. Seeing this man, this tech titan with his government contracts and his clean-lined efficiency, fold himself in half to meet his daughter's eyes.
"Show me."
Missy produced the grey stone with white streaks. Zoltan examined it with the same focus he probably gave billion-dollar contracts.
"This is exceptional," he said seriously. "Where did you find it?"
"The park. Liv took me."
His gaze flicked to me, then back to Missy. "Did she?"
"We fed the ducks."
"There weren't any ducks," I said.
"We pretended there were ducks," Missy corrected. "And I made a friend. She had pigtails. She gave me her shovel."
Zoltan's expression shifted, something softening behind his eyes that he probably didn't know I could see. "What was her name?"
Missy frowned. "I forgot to ask."
"Next time."
"Next time," she agreed. Then, with the mercurial attention span of a six-year-old: "I'm hungry."
"Maria left pasta in the fridge. Liv, would you mind—"
"On it."
I moved past him to the refrigerator, close enough to catch that cedar-and-coffee scent that had become distressingly familiar over the past weeks. The scent followed him, lingered in rooms after he left, clung to the spaces he'd occupied.
"Liv."
I turned, container of pasta in hand. Zoltan was watching me with that assessing look he got sometimes, like I was a code he was trying to crack.
"What kind of leaf?"
It took me a second to catch up. "What?"
"You said she ate a leaf. What kind?"
"I don't actually know what kind. I just know it wasn't poisonous."
"How?"
"I made sure she only touched the ones from the trees on the east side of the playground. No ornamental plants, no berry bushes, nothing with milky sap." I set the pasta on the counter. "I grew up with a sister who put everything in her mouth until she was four. I know which plants are dangerous."
Something flickered across his face. Interest, maybe. Or curiosity. Or something else I didn't want to name.
"Piper. She's twenty. Got a five-year head start on her, not that she ever listens to her older sister."
"You've mentioned her."
Had I? I couldn't remember. The lines between professional and personal had gotten blurry in this kitchen, in this house, in the hours between afternoon and evening when Missy fell asleep and I should have gone home but somehow never did.
I'd started staying late. Making up tasks. Finding reasons to be in the kitchen when he came home.
This was becoming a problem.
"She's in school," I said, turning to the microwave. "Working on her degree."
"What's she studying?"
"Why do you want to know?"
The question came out sharper than I intended. I felt his stillness behind me, that particular quality of attention he had when something didn't go according to script.
"Curiosity," he said. "You've spent weeks in my home. I know almost nothing about you."
"You know I can make a mean Old Fashioned and your daughter likes me. What else matters?"
Silence. The microwave hummed. Missy had wandered to the kitchen table and was arranging her rock collection in a new pattern, oblivious to the undercurrent crackling between the adults in the room.
"Nothing," Zoltan said finally. "Nothing else matters."
But his voice had dropped half a register, and he was still watching me when I turned around.
The microwave beeped. I grabbed the pasta and very deliberately did not look at him as I crossed to the table.
We ate together. That hadn't been the plan, but Missy insisted, and Zoltan didn't argue, and somehow I ended up sitting across from them with a plate I hadn't asked for, watching father and daughter negotiate the finer points of moon rock taxonomy.
"This one is a satellite," Missy explained, holding up a particularly round pebble.
"Satellites aren't rocks," Zoltan said.
"Moon satellites are."
"That's not—" He stopped. Looked at me. I raised my eyebrows and took a bite of pasta.
"Moon satellites are absolutely rocks," he said to Missy. "I stand corrected."
"You weren't standing. You were sitting."
"A figure of speech."
"What's a figure of speech?"
I bit back a laugh as Zoltan attempted to explain idioms to a six-year-old who kept interrupting with increasingly creative questions.
This version of him, the one who let himself be derailed and corrected and challenged, it didn't match the man Marcus Webb had described in that conduct agreement.
The one who required professional distance.
The one who ran background checks on bartenders.
My phone buzzed. I glanced down.
Marcus Webb: Received the memo from Petra regarding amended terms. We should discuss.
I stared at the message for a long moment. Then I deleted it without responding.
"Everything okay?" Zoltan's voice cut through my thoughts.
"Fine. Just my sister."
The lie came easily. Too easily. But I wasn't ready to have the Marcus conversation, wasn't ready to admit that the company's COO had been texting me about conduct agreements and legal requirements since the day I signed that first document.
After dinner, Missy went upstairs for her bath, and I found myself alone in the kitchen with Zoltan. The silence felt different now, charged with something I couldn't name.
"I should go," I said.
"It's early."
"I have the opening shift tomorrow."
"The Tavern opens at eleven."
I grabbed my bag from the counter. "And I need to do inventory before that."
"You're lying."
I stopped. Turned. He was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Excuse me?"
"You're lying. You don't have inventory tomorrow. Kevin handles Tuesday mornings."
My pulse kicked up. "How do you know Kevin's schedule?"
"I know a lot of things."
The words hung between us, heavy with implication. I thought about Marcus's text. About conduct agreements and background checks and the particular kind of surveillance that wealth could buy.
"That's not reassuring," I said.
"It wasn't meant to be."
We stared at each other across the kitchen. Three feet of hardwood and ambient lighting and the lingering smell of pasta. His gaze dropped to my mouth for half a second, then snapped back up like he'd caught himself doing something wrong.
Something was shifting. Something I didn't have a name for.
"Good night, Zoltan."
"Good night, Liv."
I made it to the front door before my phone buzzed again. Not Marcus this time. Petra.
ZB has requested I forward you the revised schedule. He's blocked two hours each afternoon for unstructured outdoor time with Missy. Per your recommendation.
I read it twice. Then a third time.
Behind me, the kitchen light clicked off.
I didn't look back.
I walked out into the November evening, pulled my jacket tighter against the chill, and opened my notes app. Scrolled to the file I'd labeled "grocery list" because I couldn't admit, even to myself, what it actually contained.
I typed one line beneath the others:
He changed his schedule.
Then I shoved my phone in my pocket and walked to the subway, the cedar scent still clinging to my jacket, Marcus Webb's memo sitting unread in my inbox, and a six-year-old's moon rock burning a hole in my consciousness.