Page 13 of Devoured

"A stripe that goes around is still a stripe, technically."

He considered her with the deep suspicion of a person who has been technically'd before and didn't care for it. "It's the line ones," he said, "and they're not here, so."

"So," Lara agreed. She crouched down to his level, which she was learning was the only altitude at which Levi conducted real business. "Here's the situation. The line socks are wet. School is in" — she checked — "twenty-six minutes. We have two options. Option one, you wear the blue ones today and we make sure the line ones are clean for tomorrow, and I personally guarantee it. Option two, you wear wet socks, which feel like a frog sat in your shoe."

A long pause. Levi was a man who liked to be given the whole picture before he committed.

"Has a frog sat in my shoe?"

"Not to my knowledge. I'm describing the sensation."

"How do you know what it feels like."

"Because," said Lara, "I once stepped in a puddle in brand-new shoes on the first day of a job I really wanted, and walked around for nine hours pretending everything was fine, and I’ve never forgotten it, and I wouldn’t wish it on you." This was true. It’d been a genuinely terrible day. She hadn’t thought about it in years, and it had not, until this exact moment, ever once been useful.

Levi looked at her. Something behind his solemn little face shifted, like a lock turning over.

"Did you cry?" he asked, with great interest.

"In the bathroom. At lunch. Where no one could see."

"Did anyone see?"

"A woman named Brenda from accounts payable. She gave me a granola bar and never told a soul." Lara held up the blue socks. "Brenda was a good egg. Blue socks?"

And Levi, who his own sister had warned, didn’t talk to people he didn't know, tipped his head back and laughed. A real one, sudden, delighted, the laugh of a kid who has just decided about you, the whole of it breaking open across his face, and he took the blue socks out of her hand and said, around the laughing, "Brenda's a good egg," like it was the funniest collection of words he'd ever been handed, and Lara laughed too, helplessly, because six-year-olds were contagious and she hadn’t seen it coming.

She was still laughing when she felt the doorway change.

Dean was in it. Dust on him, in from the barn, one hand on the frame, and he wasn't looking at his son. He was looking at her, at her face, and whatever was on her face had stopped him flat in the door of his own house. She didn't know what he saw. She knew only that he was looking at her like she'd done something to the room, and that the look was not cold, was the furthest thing from cold she'd gotten off him yet, and that it lasted exactly as long as it took him to realize he was doing it.

What Lara hadn’t accounted for was Giana. The girl was by the stairs with her backpack already on both shoulders, ready first, and she’d gone still. She was watching her father watch Lara. Her eyes went from Dean’s face to Lara’s and back, quick and careful, a kid working a sum nobody had taught her yet and landing on the answer regardless. Lara caught it happening. For one bad second the woman and the eight-year-old looked at each other across the room, both of them having clocked the exact same thing on Dean’s face, and then Giana looked away, down at her own shoes, her jaw set in a way that was pure her father.

Then he shut it down, she watched it happen, the same way she'd watched it in the kitchen two nights ago, the warmth folding itself back behind the wall, and without a single word he turned and went back out the way he'd come. The screen door tapped shut behind him. Careful. Not slammed.

"Bye, Dad," Levi said, to the empty doorway, unbothered, and pulled the blue socks on.

Lara stayed crouched on the floor a second longer than she needed to, her face still warm from laughing. Levi was oblivious, already shoving his foot down into the second blue sock. But Giana had gone quiet, and she took her lunch off the counter without a word and went out to wait in the truck, and that was the thing that rode home with Lara from the school drop and would not get out of the cab. Not what she’d let Dean see on her own face. What his daughter had just seen on his.

She was getting very practiced at not letting herself wonder things about Dean Royston. It was becoming the most strenuous part of the job.

Pearl knew about the nanny before Lara got through the door.

"There she is." Pearl had the coffeepot up before Lara had fully cleared the threshold of the diner, where she'd stopped on Helen's behalf to collect a pie tin Marge had apparently been holding hostage for a week. "The woman of the hour. Sit. Marge! She's here."

"I'm not staying," Lara said, sitting, because there was clearly no version of this where she didn't.

"Course you're not. You're a busy woman. Running that whole ranch single-handed now, the way I hear it." Pearl poured the coffee Lara hadn't asked for.

"I run the office," Lara said. "I've never so much as looked a cow in the eye. Whatever you heard's been improved in the telling."

"Same thing, out here." Pearl waved the correction off, supremely unbothered. "Heard Wendy ran off. Never had the spine for it, that girl, I could've told them. Took a job minding the most-loved babies in the county and complained it was a lot." She said a lot the way another woman might say a slur.

"It is a lot," Lara said, mildly. "In fairness."

"It's a privilege," Pearl corrected, and then, leaning in on her forearms, dropping into the register of a woman getting to the real business: "And now it's you doing it. Feeding those children. Getting them off to school." Her eyes were bright and terrible. "In Dean Royston's kitchen."

"In Dean Royston's kitchen because Dean Royston's actual employee — me — got drafted in an emergency. It's temporary."