Chapter 11 #2
The problem isn’t finding someone. The problem is that introducing a stranger during the most destabilizing period of her existence feels like adding weight to a structure that’s already swaying.
She’s been handling the Kelsie situation with the steady composure of a child who has decided falling apart isn’t an option.
She goes to school. She does her homework.
She eats her meals and brushes her teeth and tells me about seal behaviors and pretends that the woman who abandoned her as a toddler isn’t currently trying to re-enter her life through the courts.
She is eight and a half years old, and she’s performing fine-ness with a competence that makes my blood run cold—because I know exactly where she learned it.
From me.
I taught her this. Not deliberately—never deliberately—but by modeling, every single day, the art of holding it together.
The tight jaw. The level voice. The “I’m fine” that closes conversations before they can reach anything real.
She watches me, and she mirrors me, and now she’s carrying things she shouldn’t have to carry because the person she learned from carries everything.
My father did this to me. I’m doing it to her.
The recognition sits in my stomach like a stone.
I look at the spreadsheet again. The red blocks stare back, indifferent to my crisis of self-awareness.
Temporary nanny. Short-term. Vetted. I can interview three candidates this week, make a decision by Friday, have coverage in place by Monday. It’s a logistics problem. I’m good at logistics problems.
From the living room, Michaela’s voice drifts through the doorway: “The prosecution calls the starfish to the stand. Please state your name and your relationship to the accused.”
I close my eyes for a second. Open them.
My phone shows a text from Caleb, sent twenty minutes ago:
Caleb:
Serena says you were “interesting” when she mentioned the park encounter. Her word, not mine. Should I be concerned?
I type back:
Me:
No.
Caleb:
That was very fast and very defensive.
Me:
It was efficient.
Caleb:
Those are not mutually exclusive.
I lock my phone before he can follow up and go back to the spreadsheet.
Fuck.
Maybe I should just quit my job?
“Dad?”
I look up. Michaela is standing in the kitchen doorway, notebook in hand, colored pencil behind her ear.
“Yeah, monster?”
“Is Marta still my nanny?”
I hesitate. She’s looking at my screen—at the search results.
“Not a new nanny,” I say, carefully closing my laptop. “A temporary one. Just until Marta’s mom is better and she can come back.”
Michaela processes this. I watch her work through it—the logic, the implications, the emotional math children do faster than any adult gives them credit for.
“I don’t want a stranger,” she says.
“I know.”
“Strangers don’t know about the cashews. And they won’t know which backpack is mine, or that I don’t like being picked up from the front entrance because Hannah Baxter’s mom always tries to talk to me about dance classes. And I don’t dance.”
“I’ll make sure whoever we find knows all of that.”
“You can’t make someone know things. Knowing takes time.”
She’s right. She’s inconveniently, devastatingly right.
And she’s not making this argument because she’s scared of strangers.
She’s making it because the last year of her life has been a masterclass in the difference between people who show up because they’re paid to and people who show up because they want to, and she can tell the difference.
“I want Miss Nora,” she says—and it’s like a gong goes off in my ears.
“Michaela—”
“She already knows about the cashews. She knows which backpack is mine. She knows I don’t like the front entrance.
She knows how I take my hot chocolate. She knows about the custody situation, and she doesn’t make it weird.
” Michaela counts the points on her fingers—a Caleb move, and she knows it.
“She’s not a stranger. And Archimedes likes me. ”
“Ms. Harrison is the school principal,” I say, and my voice shifts into the measured, reasonable, this-is-how-the-world-works tone I use when I’m constructing an argument I don’t fully believe. “She has a career, a life, and responsibilities. She can’t be your babysitter.”
“I didn’t say babysitter. I said I want her.”
“She’s your principal, Michaela. There are professional boundaries—”
“Professional boundaries are stupid,” she says flatly.
“Sometimes they are,” I agree, pushing down the brief flash of her splayed over her kitchen counter. “They’re still real.”
She folds her arms over the notebook. “Miss Nora already broke them for me.”
I go still.
The words aren’t accusatory. They’re matter-of-fact, offered as evidence into the record by a child who assumes truth is useful and should therefore be stated plainly.
“That’s not what happened,” I say carefully.
“She took me to her house.”
“Because there was an emergency.”
“And because she likes me.”
My throat tightens. “Yes.”
“And because she likes you,” Michaela adds.
I stare at her.
I like her too. So much that I don’t trust myself to be in the same room.
“Dad.”
I say nothing.
She shifts her weight. “I know Miss Nora isn’t my babysitter. I just mean she could help. Maybe with pickup. Or maybe I could go there after school sometimes. Archimedes would support this plan.”
Despite myself, I nearly laugh. It doesn’t make it out. “Archie isn’t a deciding authority.”
“He should be. He has excellent instincts.”
“I don’t disagree, but that’s not the issue.”
She tips her head. “Then what is?”
What is the issue?
That Nora Harrison is the first woman I have wanted in years in any way that matters.
That my daughter likes her.
That Nora likes my daughter.
That every path from here looks like risk.
That Kelsie would use any personal entanglement she could find, twist it into instability, into impropriety, into exactly the kind of blurred line a family court loves to call poor judgment.
That nothing I want stays neatly contained by the borders of my own life. That Nora has already been touched by the fallout of my decisions, and I keep finding new ways to pull her further in.
And if I let myself imagine my daughter at Nora’s kitchen table on a routine Tuesday—doing homework while Archie lies under her feet and Nora moves around making tea like any of it is normal—I’m not entirely sure I’ll recover.
I look at Michaela and choose the version of the truth she can carry.
“The issue,” I say slowly, “is that asking Nora for that kind of help would put her in a difficult position. At school, and possibly with the board. It’s not fair to her.”
Michaela considers this. “But she helps people for a living.”
“Yes.”
“That seems like a design flaw.”
I huff out a breath. “A lot of systems are badly designed.”
She narrows her eyes at me in a way so uncannily adult it’s genuinely unsettling. “Well, I think you’re wrong.”
“About what?”
She looks at me—dark eyes, steady, her mother’s coloring and my stubbornness, and something entirely her own underneath both.
“She loves me, Dad.”
The words hit me with quiet force.
Not because I disagree.
Because I don’t.
And as I watch my daughter spin on her heels and stomp away from me, I have to wonder who I’m really protecting here.