Chapter 2
LEO
“Dr. Roussos, please, I can’t—”
“Tracy, wait!” I chase her down the hallway of my apartment.
She’s already at the door, yanking her denim jacket off the hook with a force that makes the whole rack rattle.
“She’s four! Four-year-olds throw tantrums!
Developmentally, there’s this spike in amygdala activity during early childhood that makes emotions go haywire, and—”
“She’s almost five, Dr. Roussos, and I don’t give a damn about her amygdala.
” Tracy spins around, her eyes red and puffy from what looks like fresh tears.
Awesome. Just what I needed to kick off my Monday morning—another nanny in tears.
“What I care about is that she hurled a plate at my head during breakfast!”
“It was plastic.” Even as the words leave my mouth, I know it’s a weak argument.
“It smacked me right in the head!” She points to a faint red mark on her forehead, and okay, yeah, that’s fair. Plastic or not, nobody signs up for airborne dinnerware.
“And yesterday?” Tracy’s voice climbs an octave, her hands gesturing wildly.
“She told me she hated me and hoped a shark would eat me. The day before that, she locked me in the bathroom for forty-five minutes and wouldn’t unlock the door no matter how much I begged.
And don’t even get me started on last week when she took scissors to my favorite scarf, the one my grandma knitted before she passed! ”
“I paid you back for the scarf—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“It’s not about the money!” Now she’s shouting, and I cringe because Mrs. Diaz across the hall has ears like a bat—she’s probably already pressing her ear to the door, ready to gossip with the super later.
“It’s about the fact that your daughter is a tiny, blonde Machiavelli and I am just a college student who wanted to earn enough for a ticket to Lollapalooza! I quit. I’m done. Sayonara.”
I drag a hand through my hair, feeling it stick up in wild tufts that mirror the frenzy in my chest. “Tracy, please. Listen, I know she’s been a nightmare.
Believe me, I know. But she’s processing a lot—her mom left six months ago with no explanation, no goodbye, and she doesn’t get why her world’s flipped upside down.
She’s pissed and lost, taking it out on everyone, including me, and—”
“I get it. I really do.” Tracy’s tone dips, her shoulders sagging as she buttons her coat with trembling fingers.
“But I’m a nanny, Dr. Roussos. I know how to make macaroni and cheese and help with alphabet flash cards.
I’m not some miracle worker or therapist. Emma needs more help than what I can give. I’m sorry.”
And then she’s gone, and I let her go.
The word failure doesn’t appear anywhere in my vocabulary when I’m at the lab or teaching my students about neural pathways and synaptic plasticity. But standing here in my hallway, watching the sixth nanny in six months walk out, it’s the only word that seems to fit.
I stand there for a second, staring at the closed door, trying to do the mental math that’s rapidly becoming a crisis.
It’s 9:47 a.m. I have a lecture at Columbia at noon.
That’s two hours and thirteen minutes. I need approximately forty-five minutes to get to campus, another fifteen to review my notes and set up the presentation.
Which means I need to find childcare in the next hour. Maybe less.
I don’t have childcare.
Shit.
I close the door and lean my forehead against it, taking a breath, a dull pressure building behind my eyes. The apartment is quiet, which means Emma is either hiding or plotting something destructive. Historically, both.
I push off the door and head down the hallway toward her room.
My place is nice—way nicer than my professor salary should allow, but my parents pitched in for the down payment because “Emma deserves roots,” and who can argue with that?
I’m not above taking help if it means no dodgy neighborhoods or leaky faucets.
It has two bedrooms with space to breathe, a corner office buried in my lecture notes and half-empty coffee mugs, floors that gleam when I remember to Swiffer, and windows that seal tight against winter drafts without rattling like maracas.
Emma’s room is a sun-drenched sanctuary of butter yellow and there are toys everywhere—Legos scattered like landmines, dolls with wild bedhead from endless adventures, stuffed critters piled in a fuzzy mountain—thanks to my mom’s nonstop gifts, her love language.
Her bookshelf is overflowing with dog-eared picture books I read nightly, even when she’s kicking up a fuss about lights out and her bed is a white wooden castle frame we scored two years ago when we moved in, back when the princess phase ruled her world and life felt like it might have a happy ending.
She’s not obsessed with princesses anymore. Now, she’s mostly obsessed with making sure everyone around her is as miserable as she is.
The door is closed, so I knock gently. “Em? Can I come in?”
Silence.
“Emma, I’m coming in.”
I open the door.
She’s sitting on the floor in the corner, arms crossed, glaring at me with blue eyes she got from her mother. Everything about Emma looks like Rebecca—the blonde hair, the fair skin, the delicate features. The only thing she got from me is the stubborn set of her jaw when she’s angry.
She’s angry now.
“Tracy left,” she says. It’s not a question.
“Yeah. She did.”
“Good.”
I walk in and sit down on the floor across from her, my back against her dresser. My knees protest because I’m thirty-two and sitting on the floor is not as comfortable as it used to be even just a couple years ago. “You can’t throw things at people, Emma. Ever.”
“She was mean.”
“What did she do that was mean?”
“She said no cookies for breakfast.” Her chin juts out. “You say that, too.”
“Because cookies aren’t for breakfast. They’re for sometimes.”
“Mommy gave me cookies for breakfast.”
There it was. The ghost at every meal, every bedtime, every minor conflict. A ghost with a sweet tooth and no rules.
“Mommy’s not here right now,” I say, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know, Em.”
“Why did she go?”
This is the question she asks every few days, and I still don’t have a good answer.
The truth—that her mother left us for someone else, that she’s somewhere in Boston with a man she was sleeping with while we were still engaged—is not appropriate for a four-year-old. But I don’t know what else to say.
“Sometimes adults make choices that are hard to understand,” I say carefully. “But it’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why doesn’t she come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she misses me?”
The question splits my heart in half. “I know she does.”
I don’t actually know that, but the lie is a necessary shelter for now. I have no idea what Rebecca thinks or feels because she hasn’t called, hasn’t written, hasn’t reached out once since she left. But I can’t tell Emma that, either.
Emma’s face is still scrunched up, on the verge of tears, and I can see her trying to hold it together. She’s four. She shouldn’t have to hold anything together.
“Come here,” I say, opening my arms.
She hesitates for a second, and I think she might refuse, but then she scrambles across the floor and crashes into me.
I wrap my arms around her, pulling her close, and she burrows her face into my shoulder.
She smells like the strawberry shampoo we use for her hair and something sticky that’s probably the syrup from breakfast.
“I’m sorry I threw the plate,” she mumbles into my shirt.
“I know. But you can’t do that anymore, okay? Even when you’re angry.”
“Okay.”
“And you can’t tell people you hope they get eaten by sharks.”
“Even if I really think it?”
“Some things are better kept to ourselves, Em.”
She pulls back slightly and looks up at me. “Are you mad at me?”
“No, kiddo. I’m not mad.”
“Tracy was mad.”
“Tracy was in over her head, that’s all.”
She looks up at me then. “Are you going to get a new Tracy?”
“I have to. I have to work.”
“What if I don’t like them?”
“Then we’ll figure it out together. But you have to give people a chance, Em.”
She rests her head back on my shoulder, and we sit there for a minute in silence.
I can feel her breathing start to even out, the tension leaving her small body.
This is the part that kills me—the moments when she’s soft and vulnerable and just needs her dad to hold her.
Because I know as soon as I let go, as soon as I have to tell her I need to leave for work or she needs to eat her vegetables or it’s time for bed, the walls will go back up and she’ll be angry again.
“Dad?” she says quietly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we get pizza for dinner?”
I smile, despite everything. “Yeah. We can get pizza.”
“With the stringy cheese?”
“With all the stringy cheese.”
She sits up, apparently satisfied with this negotiation, and wipes at her face with the back of her hand. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
She climbs off my lap and goes back to her corner, picking up a stuffed rabbit that’s seen better days. I watch her for a second, this small person who’s been through too much and doesn’t know how to process any of it. Neither do I, honestly.
I stand up, my knees protesting again. “I need to make some phone calls. You gonna be alright in here for a bit?”
She nods, already distracted by the rabbit.
I head back to the kitchen and immediately reach for the phone on the wall.
Maria picks up on the third ring. “What?”
“Good morning to you, too.”
“I’m at the restaurant. We’ve got a lunch rush coming and I’m elbow-deep in tzatziki. What do you want?”
“Tracy quit.”
There’s a pause. “Again?”
“It was the first time for her specifically, but yes, again in the general sense.”
“Leo.”
“I know.”
“That’s six nannies in six months.”
“I’m aware. I can count.”
“What happened?”
“Emma threw a plate at her head.”