5. Nora
— ? —
Nora
Adrian Walker is home.
I’ve managed to avoid being alone with him since I started. One dinner in my first week, Theo across the table, Brielle running the seating chart, and I kept to the kitchen and let the swinging door do the work, and the next morning his car was gone.
Some project in New York that kept him conveniently three hundred miles away while I learned the rhythms of the house, the staff, his wife.
But his car pulled into the driveway this morning, and now I can hear his voice echoing through the halls, and every cell in my body is screaming at me to run.
Not yet. You don’t have what you came for yet.
Tonight is a dinner party. Brielle has been preparing for three days - the caterers, the florist, the string quartet she insisted on even though Adrian said it was “excessive.” This is her domain, the arena where she shines, where she gets to show off the life she stole from me.
And I’m going to serve the appetizers.
“The blue dress,” Brielle says, barely looking at me as she applies her lipstick. “The staff uniform is in the closet. Make sure your hair is pulled back. I don’t want anyone confusing you for a guest.”
They won’t confuse me for anything, I think. Not with this face.
“Of course, Mrs. Walker.”
I’m on my way to get changed when I pass Adrian in the hallway.
He stops.
So do I.
For one horrible, endless moment, we just stare at each other. His eyes are exactly as I remember them: dark and deep and always seeing things other people miss. The scar on his temple is new; I don’t know how he got it. The gray at his temples wasn’t there before.
“You’re the new nanny,” he says. “We never got introduced at that dinner. I was rude. I’d been traveling.”
“Yes, Mr. Walker.” My voice is steady. I’ve practiced this a thousand times. “I started two weeks ago.”
“Adrian.” He’s still staring at me. “Call me Adrian. Mr. Walker makes me feel like my father.”
“Alright. Adrian.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t step aside to let me pass. Just keeps looking at me with those dark eyes like he’s trying to solve a puzzle he doesn’t have all the pieces to.
“Have we met before?”
Yes, I want to scream. At Theo’s birthday party, ten years ago. At our wedding, seven years ago. At our daughter’s birth, at her first steps, at a thousand breakfasts and dinners and nights when you held me like I was the most precious thing in the world.
“I don’t think so.” I force a small smile. “I have one of those faces.”
“That’s not-” He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. “Sorry. Sorry, that’s a strange thing to say to someone you just met. It’s been a long few weeks.”
“Travel is exhausting.”
“It’s not the travel.” His voice drops, goes somewhere private. “It’s coming home.”
Before I can parse that, Brielle appears at the end of the hall.
“Adrian! The Ashfords are arriving early. Come downstairs.”
He gives me one last long look, then turns and walks away.
I wait until he’s out of sight before I let myself breathe.
***
The party is a circus of privilege.
A house full of guests in designer clothes, drinking champagne that costs more than my old monthly salary, making conversation about their vacation homes and their stock portfolios and the help these days.
I move through them like a ghost, offering trays of hors d’oeuvres that I spent the afternoon preparing with the cook.
“The new nanny?” one woman asks her friend, nodding toward me. “She’s very… plain, isn’t she? I suppose that’s intentional.”
“Brielle’s not stupid. She wouldn’t hire anyone who might catch Adrian’s eye.”
I smile at them and move on.
Adrian is holding court by the fireplace, a whiskey in his hand, telling a story I’ve heard before about a college prank gone wrong. The guests are laughing at all the right moments. Brielle is at his side, her hand on his arm, the perfect political wife.
She catches me looking and her eyes narrow.
“Oh, miss?” She raises her voice, cutting through the conversation. “We need more champagne. Chop chop.”
“Of course, Mrs. Walker.”
The kitchen is a refuge. I lean against the counter for a moment, closing my eyes, letting the noise of the party fade to a dull roar.
“Rough night?”
I open my eyes. Theo is standing in the doorway, two empty champagne glasses in his hand.
“Mr. Hart - Theo.” I take the glasses from him. “I’m fine. Just needed a moment.”
“I used to do the same thing at these parties.” He leans against the counter beside me. “Hide in the kitchen. Pretend I belonged somewhere else.”
“And did you?”
“Belong?” He shrugs. “I never figured it out. Nora-” He stops. Clears his throat. “Someone I knew used to say that parties like this were just people pretending to like each other for free champagne.”
My heart stutters. “She sounds smart.”
“She was.” His eyes are on me now, searching. “She was the smartest person I ever knew. And the kindest. And the-” He stops again. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to strangers.”
“You don’t feel like a stranger,” he says softly. “That’s the strange part.”
The kitchen door swings open.
“There you are.” Brielle’s voice is sharp. “I’ve been looking everywhere. We’re out of the crab puffs, and the Ashfords are asking for-”
She stops. Takes in the scene - me and Theo, leaning close together, his hand almost touching mine on the counter.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Just discussing the catering,” Theo says smoothly. “I was telling - I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.”
“Eve,” I say. “Eve Martin.”
“Eve.” He says it like he’s testing it. Like it doesn’t quite fit. “I was telling Eve that the crab puffs are excellent.”
Brielle’s eyes move between us. Whatever she’s calculating, she keeps it to herself.
“Well, the crab puffs need refilling. Now, please.”
I nod and slip out, leaving Theo alone with a woman who doesn’t deserve him.
***
Brielle has been drinking - more than usual, more than is wise. By the time the dessert course comes around, her voice has gone sharp and her gestures have gone wide and she’s looking at me like I’m something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
“Eve, darling.” She uses the term of endearment like a blade. “Come here for a moment.”
I’m in the middle of collecting plates. The dining room goes quiet.
“Yes, Mrs. Walker?”
“I noticed you served Mrs. Ashford the wrong fork for her salad. And earlier, you used the wrong entrance when bringing in the appetizers. And just now, I saw you chatting with Mr. Hartley in the kitchen instead of attending to your duties.”
The entire room is watching. Every eye in it, waiting to see how the help handles humiliation.
“I apologize, Mrs. Walker. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t.” She turns to her guests with a practiced sigh. “Good help is so hard to find these days. You would think, for what we pay them-”
“You’re right,” I say. My voice carries clearly in the silence. “I should know my place.”
Brielle pauses. Her glass halfway to her lips.
“I’ve just never seen a hostess need this much help finding hers.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
Someone - I think it’s Adrian - makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh. Someone else - definitely Mrs. Ashford - covers her mouth with her napkin.
And Brielle goes pale. Then red. Then a mottled combination of both that makes her look like she’s choking on something she can’t quite swallow.
“How dare-”
“Brielle.” Adrian’s voice cuts through like a blade. “Let it go.”
“But she-”
“I said let it go.”
He’s looking at me. Not at his wife. At me. And there’s something in his eyes - something like recognition, or attraction, or the ghost of both.
I pick up the remaining plates and walk out of the dining room with my head high.
Behind me, I hear Theo’s voice: “I think I’ll call it a night. Lovely party, as always.”
The party deteriorates from there.
I escape to the butler’s pantry with a tray of empty glasses and the excuse of refilling them, and for thirty seconds I stand in the dark between the shelves and just breathe.
My house. My party. My pantry, where I used to hide from my own dinner guests, and the shelf paper is still the blue-and-white stripe I picked out, and none of these people know they’re being served canapés by a ghost.
The door opens behind me.
“Hiding?” Theo’s voice, low.
“Restocking.” I don’t turn around. “You?”
“Following the only interesting person at this party.” He lets the door swing almost shut behind him, and the noise of the guests drops to a murmur. “You handled that thing at the table. The way you cut her down without raising your voice-”
“I said one sentence.”
“You said one sentence the way a surgeon says one incision.” He steps closer to reach past me for the wine, and his sleeve brushes my bare arm, and every nerve I own reports for duty. “Where did you learn to do that?”
In this house. At that table. Ten years of dinner parties, and you sat at half of them.
“Waitressing,” I say. “You learn to handle difficult women.”
“Brielle isn’t difficult.” He uncorks the bottle without looking at it. His eyes haven’t left me once. “Brielle is scared. Difficult women want something. Scared women are protecting something.” A beat. “You, on the other hand - I can’t figure out which one you are.”
“Maybe I’m neither.”
“Maybe you’re both.”
We reach for the same tray at the same moment. His hand closes over mine on the silver handle, warm, steady, completely unnecessary, and neither of us moves, and the pantry is suddenly very small and very dark and very far from the party.
Step back, I tell myself. You are a nanny. He is grieving. This is your husband’s wine.
I don’t step back.
Neither does he.
“Your hands are cold,” he says quietly.
“Circulation.” My voice comes out lower than I planned. “It’s a condition.”
“Is it.” His thumb moves once across my knuckles - barely, accidentally, deliberately - and the tray between us might as well be on fire.
Voices swell outside the door. Two women, close, in the hallway, their whispers pitched at exactly the level people use when they think whispering makes cruelty polite.