3. Nora
NORA
The overdue notice on my counter is printed in red ink, which feels like an editorial choice by the utility company.
I've been staring at it for ten minutes.
Not because I'm surprised by what it says; I know exactly what it says.
I'm staring at it because it's easier than looking at the job listings open on my laptop, all of which are wrong in various ways, or the bills beside it, arranged in a small, neat stack, because organizing things is what I do when everything else is unmanageable.
The Morrisons moved to Vancouver in February.
Twin girls, eighteen months old, and the kind of placement you spend years building toward.
I gave them four years. I watched Lily take her first steps and Rose say her first word, and I told myself, carefully, for months, that watching someone else's children grow was not the same as having a family. It wasn't the same. It was enough.
Then they packed up and left, taking the one thing that had been keeping me functional with them, and I have been trying to reconstruct it ever since.
My phone rings. Local number, unfamiliar.
"This is Nora."
"Nora, it's Margaret." She sounds frazzled, which is unusual; Margaret is always composed. "Emergency placement. Are you available?"
I look around my apartment. The overdue notice. The cold coffee. The stacks of bills. The walls that have nothing on them because I've been here for six months and never committed to staying long enough to put anything up.
"Yes. What's the situation?"
"Professional athlete, male, late twenties. The infant arrived unexpectedly yesterday morning. Two months old." Papers shuffling. "Live-in position. Triple your usual rate."
I do the math without meaning to. Enough to cover the bills, sublet this place, and stop bleeding money on an apartment I've never once felt at home in. Enough to save something. I haven't saved anything since before the accident.
"How unexpectedly are we talking?" I ask.
"Baby showed up on his doorstep. Mother left a note." A pause, and then Margaret's voice drops into the register she uses when something is genuinely bad. "He's desperate, Nora. And from what I understand, the baby is too."
A baby who needs me—not convenience or optics—me.
"I can interview today."
She gives me the details. Tyler West, right winger for the Ridgeport Falcons, and first-time father as of thirty-six hours ago, his family arriving today. She hangs up before I can ask anything else, and I open a browser tab.
Hockey statistics I don't understand. Points, assists, numbers.
He's twenty-eight, six feet two, and a right wing.
Two hundred and five pounds, and two years older than me.
The profile photo shows a man with sandy-blond hair that's slightly too long, as if he keeps meaning to cut it.
Blue eyes that are tired even when he's supposed to be confident.
Something about his face catches my attention before I can stop it.
He's attractive in the way that athletes sometimes are, obvious about it, with a strong jaw, good bone structure, but it's his eyes I keep coming back to.
There's something underneath them that's been there long enough to settle in.
It shows up in the candid shots, especially where he's not looking at the camera.
He's standing apart from his teammates at team events, his jaw tight, shoulders braced.
He looks like someone who's been surviving rather than living. I recognize it because I've been doing it for two years.
More articles.
He was traded from the Pinewood Bears last season.
There's gossip I skim past. One article mentions tension with the team captain, someone called ‘Reaper,’ and speculation that Tyler is struggling to fit in in the locker room.
The recent photos show him progressively more isolated: the empty seat at team dinners, the way he's always at the edge of group shots.
He looks lonely.
And now he has a baby he didn't know existed until yesterday.
I watch a clip from last month's game. He moves on the ice as if the surface belongs to him—the kind of grace that makes no sense for someone his size, handling the puck, and taking a shot that misses by inches.
The commentator mentions inconsistent performance this season.
The camera catches his face as he skates back to the bench.
That exhaustion again. Bone-deep. The kind you can't perform your way out of.
By the time I've finished reading everything available, I'm in the shower.
By the time I'm dressed, I've organized my folder of references by date—with the CPR certification on top—because that's what I do.
The last four years, documented in careful detail.
A clean background check and glowing references from three families.
I know I'm good at this job.
It might be the only thing I'm still good at.
I look in the mirror, and my mother looks back at me.
The same hazel eyes, the green only visible up close.
The same long, wavy auburn hair that never quite cooperates, pulled back into a ponytail because there's no time and no point.
Her small frame, short where it counts, the kind of figure that has curves but still makes people underestimate her.
She was a nanny before she married my father, and she was the kind of person who walked into a room and made it feel safer without doing anything.
People handed their children to her and trusted her on instinct.
I reach for my phone, and then I remember.
Two years. You'd think the reflex would have faded by now. It hasn't. The impulse to call her when something like this happens—something uncertain, something where I need to hear her voice—doesn't fade. I just have to keep running into it.
I push it down. I've gotten good at that.
This is just a job. Professional. Temporary. I will do good work here, then move on, and not let myself believe it is anything else.
I leave with enough time to sit outside the address Margaret texted me for three minutes before going in.
A rental house in a decent neighborhood, a small front yard, and a mailbox sitting slightly crooked on its post. The kind of place someone lives when they haven't decided if they’re staying yet.
I check my reflection in the rearview mirror.
Jeans, a thin cream knit jumper over a plain shirt, and black boots.
No makeup because I never bother, and today is not the day to start.
I look like someone competent and unassuming and completely fine, which is the point.
What I don't look like is someone who just did the math on his salary and felt the particular low hum of knowing the number he'll pay me per week is more than I've saved in two years combined.
I push that down along with everything else.
I’m professional. Capable. Trustworthy. Not someone who is barely holding it together.
The engine ticks as it cools. My car is twelve years old and makes a sound on cold starts that I've been meaning to get looked at for eight months.
Parked outside this house, in this neighborhood, it feels like a neon sign.
If he were to open that door and look at me, he would clock exactly what kind of person was here to save him, and some small, stupid part of me already cares.
I groan. I should just get out, ring the bell, and get it over with.
I'm still sitting here when I hear it, even through the closed windows, even through the August heat. A baby crying. And underneath it, a man's voice, rough, low, and so exhausted it does something to my throat before I've decided to let it.
"Please. Come on, Harper, please. I don't know what else to do."
I pick up my folder and get out.
This is just a job. I will not get attached.
That's what I tell myself, standing on Tyler West's doorstep while a baby screams and a man begs her to stop.
That's what I tell myself right up until I ring the bell.