Chapter One: The Interview That Went Badly
It would later occur to Lily Calloway, standing in the Ashford kitchen with a fistful of dry cereal somehow lodged in her hair and something suspiciously like hope unfolding in her chest, that this was the precise moment she stopped being merely the babysitter. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, and a story worth telling deserves to be told properly, from the beginning, the way your grandmother would have insisted on it.
So. Tuesday.
It began, as most disasters of the domestic variety do, with an advertisement pinned to the corkboard outside the Maplewood Public Library: SEEKING RESPONSIBLE PERSON, AFTERNOONS, TWO CHILDREN, MUST BE PATIENT AND PREFERABLY IMMUNE TO CHAOS. Lily had read it three times before deciding that a person could, in fact, become immune to chaos the way one became immune to a particularly persistent cold, provided one simply refused to catch it. She was seventeen, she needed the money for a summer art program that cost more than her father made in a month of hauling freight across three states, and she had exactly the sort of steady, unbothered face that made adults trust her with their most breakable possessions. It was a useful face. It had gotten her very far in life, mostly by convincing people she felt considerably less than she did.
The Ashford house sat at the end of Birch Lane, tall and white and slightly too quiet for a house that supposedly contained two children, and Lily had barely raised her hand to knock when the door opened on its own, revealing a boy of eighteen with the exact expression of someone bracing for bad weather.
"You're early," he said, in the tone of a man delivering an accusation.
"The advertisement said two o'clock. It's two o'clock."
"Right." He did not move out of the doorway. He was tall in the specific, slightly resentful way of boys who had grown several inches faster than their wardrobes could keep up with, dark-haired, sharp-jawed, and regarding her with the wary suspicion of someone who had been burned by optimism before and did not intend to be burned again. "I'm Aiden. You're the — " He gestured vaguely, as though the word babysitter physically pained him to produce.
"Lily," she supplied. "And yes."
Somewhere behind him, something crashed with the particular finality of a lamp meeting a hardwood floor, followed by a small voice announcing, with far too much satisfaction for the circumstances, "It wasn't me!"
Aiden closed his eyes briefly, the way a man might pray for patience he did not expect to receive, and stepped back to let her in.
Here the narrator must pause to explain what neither Lily nor Aiden yet fully understood about each other, since young people are famously terrible at explaining themselves and someone has to do it. The house on Birch Lane had, two years prior, lost its heart rather suddenly, when Mrs. Ashford's car met a patch of black ice on a bridge she had crossed a thousand times before. Since then, Mr. Ashford worked two jobs and slept very little, and Aiden — who had been sixteen when it happened, and had therefore been just old enough to notice everything falling apart and just young enough to have no earthly idea how to hold it together — had appointed himself the family's unofficial glue. He made lunches. He signed permission slips in a passable imitation of his father's signature. He had not, in two years, asked a single soul for help, on the theory that needing help was a door that, once opened, might never close again. The advertisement on the library corkboard had not been his idea. It had been his father's, placed in a moment of exhausted honesty, and Aiden had spent the entire morning hoping fervently that whoever answered it would prove hopeless enough to be sent away by dinner.
Lily, for her part, understood approximately none of this yet, and merely thought he seemed like a boy who badly needed someone to tell him he was allowed to sit down.
The living room, when she reached it, told its own story. A boy of eight, presumably the source of the lamp incident, stood over the wreckage with the studied innocence of the truly guilty, while a girl of five sat beneath the kitchen table with her knees drawn to her chest, saying nothing at all, watching Lily with enormous, careful eyes.
"Toby," Aiden said, in the weary voice of a man who had said the name several thousand times already that week, "what did we say about the lamp."
"That it was already broken," Toby said, with the serene confidence of a career criminal.
"It was not already broken."
"It is now."
Lily felt, against every professional instinct she possessed, the corner of her mouth twitch. She crouched instead, drawing level with Toby's eight-year-old outrage. "What happened to it?"
"I was demonstrating a scientific principle," Toby said gravely. "Gravity."
"Compelling," Lily said. "Next time, demonstrate it on something that isn't your father's lamp."
Toby considered this counteroffer with the seriousness of a man reviewing a business proposal, and eventually nodded, as though she had passed some private test. Beneath the table, the little girl — June, though no one had told Lily her name yet — had not moved, had not spoken, had barely blinked, and something in the stillness of her struck Lily harder than the broken lamp had. She had seen that particular quiet before, in her own bedroom mirror, in the months after her mother's illness had taken its final unhurried turn. It was not shyness. It was the quiet of a child who had learned that speaking too loudly about a hope only meant more room for it to be disappointed.
"Hi," Lily said softly, not moving closer, letting the word sit in the air between them the way you'd leave food out for a cat that hadn't decided yet whether to trust you. "I'm Lily."
June did not answer. But she did, after a long moment, uncurl one arm from around her knees, which Aiden — watching from the doorway with an expression he clearly hoped was unreadable and clearly was not — seemed to find more alarming than the lamp entirely.
"She doesn't talk to people," he said quickly, almost defensively, as though Lily might take June's silence as a personal insult that required immediate correction. "Not since — " He stopped. "She just doesn't. It's not a big deal. You don't need to make it a thing."
"I wasn't going to make it a thing," Lily said, mild as milk, and watched something in his shoulders drop half an inch, the tension of a boy who had spent two years expecting every new adult in his house to reach for the nearest professional, the nearest label, the nearest reason his family needed fixing by someone other than himself.
It was, in retrospect, the first small thing that passed between them that was not an argument.
The rest of the afternoon proceeded the way most first afternoons in a strange house do, which is to say chaotically, with Lily discovering the location of the good snacks by trial and error, Toby narrating his own exploits at a volume better suited to a stadium, and June trailing Lily from room to room at exactly the distance of someone who had not decided whether to be interested or merely vigilant. Aiden hovered the entire time with the transparent, miserable energy of a man supervising his own execution, correcting nothing outright but flinching visibly every time Lily did something even slightly differently than he would have.
It was somewhere around hour three, with cereal — the good, sugared kind, procured after a lengthy and surprisingly sophisticated negotiation with Toby — that the incident occurred which the narrator promised you at the very beginning of this chapter. Toby, attempting to demonstrate a second scientific principle involving projectile motion and a spoon, launched a truly impressive quantity of cereal directly into the air above the kitchen table, where a good deal of it landed, with the unerring precision known only to breakfast foods and Fate, squarely in Lily's hair.
There was a beat of horrified silence, in which Toby appeared to reconsider his entire life's choices, and Lily reached up, extracted a single flake of cereal from somewhere near her ear, and examined it with the grave concentration of a scientist studying a rare specimen.
And Aiden Ashford, who had not laughed, genuinely laughed, in a manner he could not immediately suppress, in longer than he could accurately remember, laughed.
It surprised him more than anyone. It was not a polite laugh, not a performance for the benefit of the children; it came out of him almost violently, like something that had been dammed up so long it forgot the shape of its own release, and for one unguarded second his whole face changed, the wariness falling away to reveal someone considerably younger and considerably more tired than the boy who had answered the door. Lily looked up at him mid-cereal-extraction and found herself, for reasons she would examine later and understand rather less than she'd like, unable to look away.
Their eyes held a beat too long. The kitchen, briefly, forgot to be chaotic.
"Sorry," Aiden said, recovering himself with visible effort, the wariness sliding back over his face like a shutter coming down. "That's not — I don't usually — " He gestured helplessly at his own mouth, as though it had betrayed him without his permission, which, in a manner of speaking, it had.
"You're allowed to laugh, you know," Lily said, brushing cereal from her collar with as much dignity as the situation permitted. "It's not against the rules of the house."
"It should be," he muttered, but something in his voice had gone softer than his words, and Lily filed the contradiction away without quite knowing why it seemed important.
The doorbell rang before either of them could decide what to do with the moment they'd just had, and whatever it was standing on the porch, it did not bring good news; the narrator can promise you that much in advance, since good news rarely announces itself with three sharp, impatient rings in a row.
Aiden's face changed the instant he opened the door, all the softness of the cereal incident evaporating like breath on cold glass. "Aunt Priscilla," he said, in the flat voice of a boy greeting a storm he'd been warned was coming. "You didn't say you were stopping by."
"I don't need to announce myself, Aiden, I'm family." The woman in the doorway wore the particular, upright posture of someone who had never once in her life doubted she was right, and her gaze moved past him, into the kitchen, cataloguing the scene with the swift, merciless efficiency of an inspector: the shattered lamp, still unswept in the corner. The cereal, still drifting gently from the table onto the floor. June, silent beneath the table. A stranger — Lily — standing in the middle of it all with cereal visibly still clinging to one strand of her hair.
Something in Priscilla's expression sharpened into satisfaction, the particular satisfaction of a woman who had just been handed exactly the evidence she'd been waiting two years to find.
"Well," she said, looking at Aiden with an expression that was not quite unkind and was nowhere close to warm. "I think it's well past time your father and I had a serious conversation about who is actually raising these children in this house. Because from where I'm standing, it certainly isn't him. And it certainly isn't some girl off a library corkboard."
Aiden opened his mouth to answer, and found, for the first time in two years of holding this household together through sheer force of will, that he did not have a single word ready to say.