Page 51 of Once Upon a Fall

Only Rosie would take a moment to be sentimental about paint.

I’m not looking at the wall. I’m looking at her. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.

I clear my throat. “Let me guess. Rapunzel’s dress is purple?”

She gives me a confused look. “Obviously. Haven’t you watched the movie?”

I shake my head. “No. There weren’t a lot of fairy tales in my childhood.”

“Dean, everyone needs fairy tales in their life.”

“I think I turned out okay,” I say, turning back to the tape and the baseboards.

“Did you, though?” she asks, and I shoot her a look, the straight line of disapproval or whatever she calls it.

She smiles and then points to the paint. “It’s not the actual color of her dress. This is much lighter.”

“So why this one?” I ask.

“I saw it once in the bedroom of a little girl I used to nanny.”

“The one from Boston?”

“Right,” she says after a beat of silence. “That’s the one.”

She goes back to painting and I go back to taping.

I thought she was done with the story, but then she says, “Lindsey, her mom, was trying to be an influencer, so she pretended to paint the room while I filmed it, being overly dramatic about how hard it is to DIY things. But then when we were done, she had professionals do the rest.”

“Sounds like something a wannabe influencer would do,” I say, unimpressed.

“I thought it was funny at the time, but looking back, it feels more like a lie.”

“It’s definitely a lie,” I say. “Most of those curated posts are.”

“That’s how that world was, though. The surface had to look pretty, but underneath it was pretty messy.”

“Sounds familiar.” It comes out flatter than I meant it to.

“How so?”

How so? My mom was like that. Everything looked great on the outside, while underneath it, we were moving from apartment to apartment, chasing something or someone. Never settled.

“I’ve worked with companies like that” is all I say, and it’s not a lie. Plenty of the businesses I’ve consulted looked much better on paper. “So, is that why you left the nanny job?”

“No. It was their decision, actually.”

I don’t say anything. I want to know more, of course. Rosie was probably a really good nanny, even though I’m sure she was a total pushover.

But I don’t want to push. I want her to tell me because she wants to, not because I asked.

We’re quiet again, Rosie painting and me taping.

“It wasn’t anything I did, by the way,” she finally says, as if I were thinking otherwise. “The kids went to school all day, and my services were no longer needed.”

She says it like she’s repeating exactly how it was said to her.

“That was the hardest part—leaving the kids,” she continues. “August was seven by then. Ivy was five. I’d had her since she was two. I don’t even know how they’re doing now.”