Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 87538 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87538 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
I smile and see the corners of his eyes crinkle, so I know he’s smiling too. I look away. I’ve got to keep some kind of wall between us but it’s becoming more and more difficult. The more I know Dax, the more I like him and the more I want to know.
After a couple of beats of silence, he asks, “Do you see your parents a lot?”
“They died,” I say. “Six years ago.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” People always say they’re sorry when they find out my parents have died, and it never makes much sense to me. Maybe because I’m not sure what they’re sorry for—obviously no one is apologizing for murdering them in cold blood. I suppose they’re apologizing for my loss. Except I’m not sure it was much of a loss. They were alive and then they weren’t. And honestly, it hasn’t made a whole lot of difference to me. Okay, so we don’t join them at Claridge’s for Christmas dinner. We don’t write them birthday cards. But our family is intact.
It’s still me, Eddie and Dylan.
As it always has been.
I felt like a fraud at the funeral. So many people crying and saying we were too young to lose our parents. I suppose on the outside it looked that way, but what they didn’t understand was we never had them to begin with. Not much changed for us. Dylan was at university, I was about to graduate Portland. It was only Eddie who was still living in the Mayfair town house. She was fifteen and every spare moment of her day she was studying. That year, my first job was a live-out position, so I could move back into the town house to live with Eddie. The plan was that once I turned twenty-five and inherited, things would change.
“My brother and sister and I are close. Like you and Jacob, except we hate each other less.”
He laughs and I get a flutter of butterflies in my stomach. “We don’t hate each other.” He pauses. “No, we really don’t. He’s just irritating. He’s the oldest, and he tries to over-manage situations. Over-manage me. He just needs to stay in his lane.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “I’m sure Eddie and Dylan think the same about me.”
“But you’re so capable,” he says. “They must need you.” The sentence lingers in the air as if he wants to add something to it but knows he shouldn’t.
I take it as a compliment. It’s good to be needed.
I stare out the window, watching the oncoming traffic trying to get to the place we just left. Did my parents need each other? Or anyone? Would they have grieved if Eddie, Dylan or I had died suddenly?
“My parents were pretty busy when we were growing up. They had really demanding jobs, working long hours,” Dax says. “And then I was the youngest. It’s easy to get…forgotten isn’t the right word, because I never felt that, but I was able to get on with things in my own way because of the chaos and the sheer numbers of us.”
Something snags inside me—a sense of understanding. “I know that feeling,” I say. I’ve never thought about it like that, but as I grew up and the nannies were more focused on Eddie and Dylan, I was able to do pretty much do as I wanted, how I wanted.
“Really? But you were the oldest.”
“I flew under the radar in the way you’re describing.”
“Yeah, that’s a good way of saying it. Under the radar.”
“I didn’t do anything bad,” I say.
He lets out a half-laugh. “Right.”
“I just did what I wanted.”
“And you always wanted to be a nanny?” he asks.
“Yeah. Nannies were kind and helpful and made a real difference. I liked that.”
“Does the role live up to what you thought it would be?”
I pause before I answer. “It absolutely does.”
“But that’s not the end of your answer,” he says.
Our eyes catch in the rearview mirror again and I look away. How could he tell that? “Sometimes I think I’d like to do…I’m not sure more is the right word. Different, maybe.”
He doesn’t respond, but the silence isn’t awkward. It’s like he’s left room to breathe. To think. He’s not asking questions, one after another, or trying to fix anything. As a result, I’m thinking about what more could be for the first time in a long time.
I’m always so busy, my head so full of Dylan and Eddie and whichever children I’m looking after, I rarely think about what an alternative life might look like. There’s no point, is there? I’m not even sure if I’d be able to come up with something else. There’s an old niggling gap where I wish I’d gone to university, but to study what? Archeology? Sociology? Biochemistry? I don’t know what would interest me. Maybe it all would.