20. Conrad
CONRAD
Monday morning didn’t go as I’d planned.
I was halfway through making coffee when I realized Winnie should’ve arrived already.
At first, I didn’t panic. I reminded myself that traffic was a thing.
Sometimes people slept through their alarm.
Perhaps my kids’ favorite nanny had finally snapped and decided to sleep for twelve consecutive hours after dealing with our family for months.
Honestly, I wouldn’t blame her in the slightest. Still, by the time the coffee finished brewing and the grandfather clock in the foyer ticked past six-thirty, unease had started crawling under my skin.
Winnie was never late. Not even once.
I checked my phone again. No texts and no missed calls. Odd.
CJ wandered into the kitchen in pajama pants and mismatched socks, his beloved notebook tucked under his arm. “Morning,” he mumbled sleepily.
“Morning, buddy.”
He climbed onto a stool and immediately squinted around the kitchen. “Where’s Winnie?”
“There’s probably traffic. Maybe a wreck on the highway.”
CJ frowned slightly. “She’s never late.”
That uncomfortable feeling tightened another notch. I grabbed my phone off the kitchen counter and called her. The line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer.
I ended the call, trying very hard not to spiral immediately into worst-case scenarios. Which unfortunately was difficult after the break-in. My brain had become deeply talented at imagining horrifying possibilities ever since two men had forced their way into my home.
I ran my hand through my hair. “She probably forgot to charge her phone,” I muttered.
CJ watched me carefully over the rim of his orange juice glass. “You sound like you don’t believe that.”
By six forty-five Bianca had entered the kitchen, dressed for school. Billie followed two minutes later, wearing one shoe and carrying a spoon for reasons known only to herself.
Bianca immediately noticed the absence. “Where’s Winnie?”
“Running late.”
Billie slapped her hand to her chest. “Kidnapping.”
I sighed. “No. That’s a ridiculous assumption.”
CJ slowly lowered his spoon. “What if she finally got arrested for tax fraud?”
I stared at him. “Why would you think Winnie commits tax fraud?”
CJ shrugged. “Her energy is complicated.”
I called again while the kids ate breakfast and discussed the various (and ridiculous) reasons Winnie would be late.
Still no answer.
Something cold settled deeper into my stomach. Winnie always communicated—the break-in, when someone fell and she wondered if they needed stitches… even when she wasn’t sure what to make for dinner. Winnie always touched base with me.
Always.
I finally texted her while helping Billie locate her second shoe beneath the couch.
Me: Are you okay?
A minute later:
Me: Kids are worried.
Then, because I enjoyed emotional self-destruction:
Me: I’m worried too.
Nothing. No typing bubble. No response.
By seven-thirty, I’d officially crossed from mildly concerned into full tizzy. I called my boss as I packed the kids’ lunches.
“Morning, Conrad,” Greg answered distractedly. “Please tell me you finished the preliminary projections.”
“Not yet. My nanny didn’t show up.”
Silence. “Congratulations?”
“I have to stay home.”
That got his attention. “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet.” I shoved apple slices into reusable containers with perhaps unnecessary aggression. “She’s not answering calls or texts. I need to get the kids off to school and be here when they come home.”
Greg sighed heavily enough that I could practically hear his disappointment radiating through the phone. “We really need that quarterly report polished off today.”
“I know.”
Longer silence.
“As long as I get the report by tonight, I don’t give a damn if you’re working from home, the office, or the moon.”
“Thank you.”
“You owe me,” he said.
“I definitely do.”
By eight-fifteen, the kids were finally out the door. Billie hugged me hard before climbing into the carpool. “Tell Winnie I said hi if she escaped the tax police.”
“I will.”
Bianca lingered beside the curb. “She’s okay, right, Daddy?”
Bianca almost never asked emotional questions directly.
I forced a reassuring smile. “I’m sure she is.”
CJ narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The fake calm thing.”
I pointed at the car. “Go to school.”
He sighed as he got in beside his sisters. The second they disappeared down the street, my composure cracked. I called Winnie again immediately. Straight to voicemail this time.
I paced the kitchen while listening to the automated message before hanging up and trying again like a lunatic. Still nothing. I spent the entire morning working from the dining room table with one eye on spreadsheets and the other on my phone.
Every notification made my pulse jump.
None of them were her.
Emails. Calendar reminders. One truly unhinged marketing text about patio furniture.
Not Winnie.
Around eleven, I started laundry mostly because movement felt more productive than panicking.
After a wash cycle, I worked on quarterly projections.
After moving the clothes to the dryer, I moved on to revenue summaries.
Then, I folded some towels and tried calling Winnie for the fortieth time. Nothing.
By noon, I’d convinced myself of at least twelve different catastrophic scenarios and narrowed them down to the three most likely.
She’d either been in a horrific car accident, was deathly ill, or she had a family emergency.
Then there was the uncomfortable possibility of a delayed emotional realization that kissing your employer was professionally disastrous.
That last one sat particularly badly. What if I’d pushed too hard? Mother’s Day had been emotional, but beautiful and intimate in ways I hadn’t expected.
Then there was the kissing.
Then her almost telling me something.
There are things you don’t know about me.
The memory replayed relentlessly while I transferred another load of laundry to the dryer. Something about the way she’d said it had felt heavy and important. There had been a confession-level of vulnerability in her tone.
Had I scared her? Had I overstepped?
I leaned against the laundry room counter and groaned softly into my hands.
God.
Maybe inviting her into all the Mother’s Day planning had been unfair. Maybe I’d blurred lines she’d been trying to maintain. Maybe she’d realized I was emotionally attaching to her like an idiot and decided disappearing was easier.
But she’d been fine the past week. She’d even had one of Billie’s friends over. Maybe it had taken her the week to process it.
I actually stopped breathing for a second. Losing Winnie suddenly felt unimaginable. Devastating in a way I couldn’t fully process.
And I’d become aware of that at the exact same time she vanished. Excellent timing, Conrad. Truly masterful emotional planning.
Around one-thirty, I abandoned all pretense of concentration and stood staring out the kitchen window toward the garden pavilion. The kids had decorated it with tiny paper flowers after Mother’s Day. A few still fluttered gently in the breeze beneath the shade scrim.
Winnie loved that pavilion. I remembered the look on her face when I came home from work the day the kids had revealed it to her. That expression had wrecked me more thoroughly than the kissing. Kindness shouldn’t overwhelm anyone like that.
My phone remained excruciatingly silent. By the time school was over, I was operating entirely on caffeine and anxiety.
The kids burst through the door and immediately started talking over one another.
“Did Winnie make monster muffins today?”
“CJ traded his pudding cup for Pokémon cards.”
“I think our PE teacher is getting divorced.”
I barely heard any of it.
“Have you heard from her?” Bianca asked suddenly.
All three kids went quiet.
I gripped the edge of the counter. “No.”
Billie frowned. “That’s weird.”
Yes, it was weird.
Very weird.
CJ leaned forward between the seats. “Maybe she got sick.”
The suggestion made my stomach drop unpleasantly. Some irrational part of me had never fully considered Winnie vulnerable before. She always seemed so composed. Unshakable, really. The idea of her alone somewhere, hurt or frightened, made something protective and ugly rise immediately in my throat.
Being inside our home all day had only made the absence louder. There was no tea steeping, no music drifting faintly from the living room, and no Winnie moving through the house in flowing black fabric while Billie followed her around asking deeply alarming questions.
The kids kept glancing toward the front door hopefully every few minutes. Each time disappointment followed. I tried working again while helping with homework. It went terribly.
CJ wrote an entire fake historical account about cursed pirates instead of working on his math. Bianca corrected my spreadsheet formatting without permission. Billie asked if raccoons could legally own property because she saw one near our trashcan the night before.
Usually, Winnie handled this chaos effortlessly. Without her, everything had tilted.
At six-thirty, I found myself standing in the kitchen staring at my phone again while pasta boiled over because I’d forgotten it existed.
Billie appeared beside me holding a dinosaur covered in marker. “You’re doing the fake calm again.”
I exhaled slowly. “I’m just worried about Winnie.”
Billie wrapped her arms around my waist. “She’ll come back, Daddy. She loves us.”
The certainty in her tone broke my heart.
I wanted to believe that. I really, really did. But something felt off.
And the worst part was I had absolutely no idea where Winnie even lived. Which suddenly felt like a catastrophic oversight for a man apparently in love with his children’s mysteriously disappearing nanny.
By seven o’clock, the entire house had fully descended into collective emotional instability. Bianca had stopped pretending she wasn’t worried and was now pacing in front of the living room windows, pretending to check weather conditions.