3. Quinn #2
He wasn’t kidding. The eggs are buttery, rich, and fluffy.
She serves them up with thick-cut toast and fruit sliced into shapes, because Lillie will only eat a strawberry if it’s “fancy.” There’s real orange juice, too, the kind with pulp, in a glass pitcher.
The whole thing is so far from my usual breakfast of whatever’s in the kitchen that doesn’t eat me first that I feel like I’m playing a role in someone else’s life.
Lillie chatters her cute little head off throughout the entire meal. “The pony’s name is Poptart,” she tells me around a mouthful of food. One look from me, and she swallows before continuing. “He’s brown with a white spot. He’s a special horse and he knows we’re coming. Daddy, how does he know?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s been very distracted this morning, from the looks of it—but then, I wouldn’t know how distracted he usually is.
We’re normally like two ships passing in the night: I come in, he leaves for work.
Yet somehow, in the middle of all of that, I managed to develop this embarrassing crush.
He blinks hard and turns to her. “I’m sure the caregivers told him.”
“Does the horse like cupcakes?” That question is directed at me, as if I know anything about horse transport.
“Um, maybe,” I muse while pouring myself a little extra orange juice, because it’s probably the most delicious I’ve ever drank. “I think they like carrots. Maybe they like carrot cake too?”
She laughs. I laugh with her. Dorian, on the other hand, does not laugh.
He’s doing all the usual dad things. He buttered her toast and cut it in half—triangles, they have to be triangles.
But he’s not really here. I don’t know how else to describe it.
His eyes keep moving to the window, to his phone.
He checks the phone once, and then very deliberately flips it back over.
There’s a tightness around his mouth that wasn’t there last night. Trust me, I was looking at his mouth.
He’s carrying something heavy.
I want to ask if he’s okay, but I don’t, because I’m the nanny, and it’s not my business. Are you okay? is a question you ask people you’re allowed to worry about.
But I notice it, the way I notice everything about him, which is a problem I keep telling myself I’m going to deal with, but keep conveniently forgetting to pursue.
Then, because the morning needs a little extra awkwardness, Tristan comes in.
He appears in the kitchen doorway, and everything in me goes still and small, the way it always does around him.
I’ve never figured out what it is. He’s never been anything but polite to me.
He never raises his voice or says a cross word.
He barely says any words at all. But there’s something behind his eyes that’s just flat.
Off. When he looks at you, you get the distinct feeling he’s already worked out three ways the moment could go and prepared for each of them.
He’s got to be some kind of security consultant.
That would explain the walk, and the stillness, and the way the guards outside stand up straighter when his car rolls through the gate.
But I don’t ask. You don’t ask Tristan things.
You just sort of hope he doesn’t ask you anything.
He crosses the room to where Dorian is sitting and leans down to say something low, right against his ear. It’s too quiet for me to catch a single word.
It’s subtle, the way Dorian changes, but he does change. If I wasn’t already cataloging his face like it’s my job, I would miss it.
His jaw sets. Something goes cold and dark behind his eyes, the exact opposite of the way he looks when he looks at Lillie.
The hand resting on the table goes very still.
For just a second, sitting at his own breakfast table, where he just cut his daughter’s toast, he looks like a man I would not ever, under any circumstances, want to cross.
Then his eyes move to Lillie, who is deep in an argument with a strawberry and hasn’t noticed a thing, and it’s like watching someone physically fold something up and put it in a drawer.
His shoulders come down, and the coldness drains out of his face.
By the time he speaks, whatever it was is gone so completely that if I hadn’t seen it, I would never believe it was there.
“Give me a few minutes,” he tells Tristan in an easy, mild voice. “We’re going to get a pony.”
Tristan’s eyes flick to me briefly. Something passes over his face that isn’t quite a smile, but is standing where a smile would go if he was capable of one. “Poptart,” he says.
“You know about Poptart?” I ask, because, apparently, I’ve lost my mind.
“Everybody knows about Poptart.” He actually looks kind of fond as his gaze brushes over Lillie. Then he’s gone, as quietly as he came. I’m pretty sure the temperature in the room comes back up about ten degrees.
Lillie looks up from her plate. “Is Uncle Tristan coming to get the pony?”
“Not this time, baby,” Dorian tells her.
“He’s scary,” she announces matter-of-factly before popping a fancy strawberry in her mouth. “But he gave me a dollar once.”
I can’t help it. A laugh blurts out of me before I can stifle it. Dorian looks at me across the table, and something in his face has gone soft again. It reminds me exactly how much trouble I’m in. You know, in case I forgot.
I did not forget.
“Eat your toast,” he tells his daughter. “Poptart would want to be sure you had a good breakfast before you two meet.”
I finish my toast, too, sitting in the middle of someone else’s beautiful life. And I try very hard not to think about the fact that in one week, if I say yes, this man is going to walk into my sister’s engagement party with his hand on my back.
And that some part of me, the part I’ve been arguing with since last night, has already decided the answer.