4. Theo
— ? —
Theo
I don’t want to be here.
The thought loops through my head as I pull into Adrian’s driveway, the same thought I’ve had every time I’ve visited this house in the past two years.
The place feels wrong now. Off-balance. Like someone rearranged all the furniture just enough that you keep bumping into things you thought you knew.
Adrian called this morning. “Dinner Friday. We haven’t caught up in weeks. Brielle misses you.”
I doubt that. Brielle tolerates me the way she tolerates everyone, with polished smiles and calculating eyes. But I come anyway. Because Lily is here, and someone has to make sure she’s okay.
The new nanny opens the front door.
“Mr. Hartley?” She’s not what I expected. Mid-thirties, maybe. Dark hair pulled back. A face that’s objectively attractive but strangely hard to hold in your memory, one of those faces that slides away when you try to focus on it. “They’re expecting you in the living room. Can I take your coat?”
“Thanks.” I hand it over, watching her as she turns to hang it up. There’s something about the way she moves. Something familiar in the set of her shoulders.
“Have you worked for families like this before?” I hear myself asking.
She turns back. “I’ve known families like this my whole life.”
And then she laughs.
The sound stops me cold in the middle of the foyer.
I know that laugh.
It’s impossible - I know it’s impossible - but I’ve heard that laugh at a hundred dinners and one wedding that should have been mine. A low sound, warm and surprised, like she didn’t expect to find something funny and is delighted that she did.
Nora’s laugh.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Hartley?”
I realize I’ve been staring. The nanny is watching me with those hard-to-place eyes, her head tilted slightly to the left-
The way Nora used to tilt her head when she was waiting for you to explain yourself.
“No.” My voice comes out rough. “No, sorry. Just - you reminded me of someone.”
“I get that a lot.” She smiles, and it’s not Nora’s smile, but the pause before it - that slight hesitation, like she’s deciding whether to commit to the expression-
“Theo!” Adrian’s voice from the living room. “Stop flirting with the help and get in here.”
The nanny’s face doesn’t change, but something shifts in her posture. A stiffening. A closing.
“Enjoy your dinner, Mr. Hartley.”
“Theo,” I correct her, not sure why it matters. “Please.”
“Theo, then.” She says my name the way you’d say a word in a foreign language - careful, precise, like she’s tasting it. “I should check on Lily.”
She disappears down the hall before I can say anything else.
***
Dinner is exactly as uncomfortable as I expected.
Adrian holds forth about some development project he’s working on. Brielle makes appropriate impressed sounds at appropriate intervals. The food is excellent and tastes like cardboard in my mouth.
The nanny comes in twice - once to bring Lily down to say goodnight, once to collect the dishes Brielle passive-aggressively pushed toward her end of the table. Both times, I find myself tracking her movements like a man cataloguing evidence he doesn’t understand.
The way she argues with Brielle over Lily’s bedtime. Chin up, voice calm, not backing down even when Brielle’s tone goes sharp. Nora used to argue exactly like that, like she was carved from something too solid to be intimidated.
The way she holds her water glass. Three fingers wrapped around the bowl instead of by the stem like you’re supposed to.
It’s a tiny thing. Probably nothing.
But Nora always held her glass wrong. I used to tease her about it at every dinner party, poking her arm until she’d laugh and threaten to throw the wine at my head.
The pause before she smiles. Like she’s evaluating whether the expression is worth the effort.
I should stop watching her mouth. I’m at my best friend’s table, his wife three seats away, and I’m studying the hired help’s smile like it owes me an explanation. Whatever this is, it isn’t decent. I don’t stop.
“Theo?” Adrian’s voice cuts through my inventory. “You’re a million miles away, man. Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I drag my eyes away from the doorway the nanny just disappeared through. “Just tired. Work’s been brutal.”
“You should take a vacation. Brielle and I just got back from Turks and Caicos. You wouldn’t believe the-”
I stop listening.
The nanny is standing in the kitchen doorway now, half-visible through the gap in the swinging door. She’s watching me watching her. And for one impossible second, I would swear on everything I’ve ever believed that she knows what I’m thinking.
Her face is wrong. The bone structure, the nose, the shape of her eyes - none of it matches the woman I’ve been mourning for two years.
But everything else.
Everything else is a haunting.
And underneath the haunting, something worse. Heat. Low and unwelcome and entirely alive, because I’m not just cataloguing a ghost, I’m watching a woman’s mouth while she talks. Wanting a stranger because she moves like a dead woman I loved. There’s a word for men like me, and it isn’t a kind one.
***
I leave before dessert, claiming an early morning I don’t have.
Adrian walks me to the door, clapping me on the shoulder with the easy confidence of a man who has never doubted his own welcome anywhere. “Good to see you, man. Let’s do this more often.”
“Absolutely.” Another lie in a night full of them.
The nanny appears from nowhere to hand me my coat. Our fingers brush during the transfer, and I feel it like an electric shock - something in the touch that shouldn’t be there, a muscle memory my body recognizes even if my brain refuses.
“Drive safe, Mr. Hartley.”
“Theo.”
“Theo.” That pause again. That tasting-the-word hesitation. “Goodnight.”
I make it to my car before my hands start shaking.
I sit in the driver’s seat for a long time, engine running, heat blasting against skin that won’t stop feeling cold. The house looms in my rearview mirror. A light comes on in an upstairs window - Lily’s room - and I see the nanny’s silhouette moving behind the curtains.
I should drive away. I should go home and pour myself a drink and forget I ever noticed a laugh that sounds like a ghost.
But I can’t stop hearing it. Can’t stop cataloguing all the little ways she moved and spoke and held herself that shouldn’t mean anything and somehow mean everything.
The face is wrong.
But the face could be changed. Surgically. If someone had enough reason. If someone wanted badly enough to disappear.
I’m being insane. I know I’m being insane. Nora is dead. I stood at her grave. I watched them lower an empty casket into the ground while her daughter asked if mommy was in the box.
There was no body. There was never a body.
My phone sits in my hand. The search bar waits. Facial reconstruction. Jane Doe recoveries. River survival rates.
Typing any of it makes me the man who never let her go. The man who stands at graves talking to boxes.
The phone goes face down on the seat, and I grip the wheel until my knuckles ache.
I’m building a conspiracy theory on the foundation of a laugh. I need to stop. I need to go home. I need to let the dead stay dead and the living stay strangers.
I put the car in reverse.
Halfway down the driveway, I slam on the brakes.
Alone in my car, in the dark of my own making, I say her name out loud for the first time in months.
The last time was a cemetery parking lot, two years ago, with the dirt still fresh. It sounded like an ending then.
“Nora.”
This time it sounds like a question.
And I’m going to find the answer.