"Night, Red."
The word comes out before I've decided to say it. She stops, and I feel it immediately, the same thing she must have felt the first time she called me West, that lurch of having said something you didn't plan to say and not being able to take it back.
"Red?"
I gesture vaguely at her hair. "Your hair. It's auburn. Red. I don't know why I said that."
She looks at me for two beats.Three.
"Goodnight," she says, and closes her door.
I go downstairs to clean Harper's bottles. Before I know it, I've washed the same one twice.
Red.I gave her a nickname. The same person I've been telling myself is just an employee in my house.
I'm so fucked.
10
NORA
Three weeks in, and I've stopped pretending to myself that this is like other jobs.
In other jobs, I maintained a professional demeanor. I was warm with the children and pleasant with the parents, and I always knew where I ended and where the family began. I was good at it. I'd refined it over four years.
This is not like other jobs.
Tuesday morning, Riverside Park. It's always busy at this hour: nannies and parents and pushchairs in every direction, the sociable herd of people managing small, unreasonable people and finding solidarity in proximity. Harper is in her pram, tucked into the bassinet attachment, lying on her back and watching the world drift past above her with Tyler's blue eyes.
Tyler spreads the blanket under the tree while I lift Harper out and settle her on her back between us. She blinks at the sky like it's personally offended her.
He drops onto his stomach with his chin in his hands, making slow, careful faces at Harper while she watches him with the total seriousness of someone conducting academic research.
I should be watching Harper.
I'm mostly looking at the back of his neck where his hair iscurling slightly at the nape, and I would very much like to stop doing that.
It happens while I'm watching Harper, which is the correct order of operations and where I should have been to begin with.
She's looking at me. Her face does the serious-concentration thing it does when she's about to do something new. And then it transforms, something unfurling in it, a door opening.
A real smile. Social, deliberate, aimed at me.
"Tyler." I hear the urgency in my own voice. "Tyler, look."
He scrambles upright, looks at Harper, looks at me, and then looks back at Harper, who obliges him by doing it again, but bigger this time.
The sound he makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"That's my girl." His phone is already out. Filming, narrating, doing both simultaneously, the way he does with Harper, full-body attention, completely unselfconscious. "Harper Rose West's first smile at exactly two and a half months. Gold medal. Ten out of ten. Absolutely devastating performance."
I'm laughing, and he grins at me over his phone. The expression on his face does something to my stomach that it needs to immediately stop doing.
Laura and Maria come over to our blanket. Laura has twin boys, and Maria has a toddler currently dismantling a sandcastle across the park, and both of them are watching Tyler the way people do when they think they're being subtle about it.
Laura leans close to me and drops her voice, though not quite enough. "Is that the hockey player?"
Tyler's back is to us, but his shoulders shift slightly, and I see him make himself busy adjusting Harper's blanket.