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VIDAR
Nicole was a complete surprise. And not just her finding me in the bathroom. She was younger than I expected – and cute. My previous housekeeper had been a substantial woman in her fifties. Nicole was about five foot six, somewhere in her mid-twenties, with pretty blue eyes and soft brown hair scraped back into a ponytail.
This was the woman who had been cleaning my house for months.
The one who made the best chicken soup in the world.
After I shook her hand, I quickly put on a white terry cloth robe and tied the sash around my waist. I felt that the “nice to meet you” line was awkward, but it was better than nothing.
She said, “I am sorry about invading your privacy. I’ll go.”
“There’s no need,” I said. “If you wait half an hour, I’ll be gone, and you can finish.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
She said, “Then I’ll go outside and wait by the elevator.”
“That is ridiculous. You don’t need to stand outside in a hall for half an hour. You can wait in the living room. Sit on the couch.”
“Yes, sir.”
She left, taking the metal cart with her, and I closed the bedroom door, so I could finish getting ready for the day.
Nicole intrigued me. As I shaved, I wondered about her. She was a young woman with her entire life before her. What made her decide to be a cleaning woman? Did she have any other ambitions?
Not that it was any of my business.
As I dressed and tied my red tie in a Half Windsor knot, I remembered one of the few pieces of advice my father had given me. I was about eight or nine and upset that my current nanny was leaving. At the time, I thought she was getting married, but in hindsight, I don’t know what to think. She’d gained some weight and cried a lot in the bathrooms.
She was probably pregnant, and given his history, there was a good chance that my father was responsible.
I remember my father telling me not to cry. “Don’t be a crybaby. She’s just a nanny, and you’re getting too old for one anyway.”
“But she is my friend,” I blubbered.
He shook his head. “Do not make friends with the staff. They are not friends. They are employees, and they will resent your prying into their lives.”
I wondered if that nanny had resented my father sneaking into her bed, but that was all conjecture. My father was dead these past eight years and he could not defend or explain himself.
After I put on my dress black socks, being careful to line up the seam so it was under the crook of my toes and wouldn’t bother me all day, I came out to find Nicole sitting on one of my leather couches with a book in her lap. “What are you reading?” I asked, and she startled.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I’ll put it back.”
“No rush,” I said. “What are you reading?”
She held the book up. “Red World series. Book Two apparently.”
I asked, “Are you a fan?”
She said, “Not yet. I see it all over the place with the movie ads, and I was interested.”
I’d also seen the ads for the Red World movie coming out. I said, “It’s good, but you’ll like it more if you read book one first.”
She made a little shrug and put the hardback novel back on its shelf. “Maybe another time. I don’t have a lot of free time for reading fiction, and I’m afraid if I get started, it will take over my life.”
“I listen to audio books more than I actually read,” I told her. “That way, I can listen to books while I’m travelling or working out.”
She nodded. “Good multi-tasking. I’d do it when I clean, but we’re not allowed to use headphones and it seems weird to have a book being narrated to an entire room.”
“No headphones? What are you talking about?”
“It’s one of the rules for Nilsson Tower maintenance crew. No headphones. I suppose it’s a safety issue to make sure we pay attention to what we’re doing and can communicate with each other.”
“But you work by yourself in my apartment.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t have a problem with your wearing headphones while you work in my apartment.”
She smiled. “Okay. Great. Thanks.”
Her smile lit up her face and made me smile, too. I realized, belatedly, that I was just standing there, talking to her, keeping her from doing her work, keeping myself from doing mine. “Goodbye, then,” I said. “And I apologize again for not setting the alarm.”
She said, “No problem. It was a shock, but it could have been worse if you were just stepping out of the shower. I mean, at least you had underwear on.” She stumbled over the words, but she held her chin high. “It’s no different than meeting somebody at a swimming pool.”
I agreed and briefly wondered what kind of swimsuit Nicole would wear. A brief bikini or a practical one piece?
But that, like her private life, was none of my business. “Goodbye,” I said abruptly and left the room.
* * *
NICOLE
NOW THAT I’D SEEN VIDAR in his underwear, I couldn’t unsee it.
Wowsa.
I rubbed my hands on my face and gave a nervous little laugh.
I knew his brother Gareth was fit. I’d seen pictures of him and his gorgeous model wife on beaches on the internet, but Vidar was always the one who stayed in the background.
Which just goes to show that the quiet geeky boys work out too. I don’t know why I was so surprised. Vidar had a small gym in the apartment complete with a rowing machine and an all-in-one monstrosity with pulleys and bars and a computer that adjusted the tension. I’d researched it online and knew it cost thousands of dollars. Much too pricey for me. The machine had dozens of programmable workouts for every level, and now I could imagine him all hot and sweaty working out in a tank top and shorts.
But whether he worked out or what programs he used was irrelevant.
My job was to clean his apartment – nothing more.
I rolled my shoulders back, put on new gloves, and headed to the master bathroom. But as I sprayed window cleaner on the enormous mirrors, I kept imagining Vidar standing there, brushing his teeth.
* * *
VIDAR
OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, I thought of Nicole often. I downloaded some of the surveillance footage from the security cameras but watching her clean wasn’t very interesting. I did find it amusing, though, that she sometimes waved at the cameras.
I would enjoy talking with her but decided that it was best to keep my distance.
And then in April, everything changed.
I was called one evening and informed that my half-brother Gareth and his wife Yvonne had died in a small plane accident. The US stock market waivered for a few days, not knowing what would happen to Nilsson Technologies without Gareth at the helm, but I made a public announcement that I would be acting CEO until further notice.
When my Grandfather Nilsson was alive, he ran the entire family with an iron fist and now, without him, my extended family was less organized than it had been before. With the crisis of Gareth’s death, we all called each other, wondering who would take charge. Grandma Rika wanted to help, but she wasn’t capable. She was still strong-willed and feisty, but her memory was not what it used to be. I offered to help Gareth’s mother DeeDee plan the funeral, but she refused. She has never liked me, and I suppose the feeling is mutual.
I was afraid DeeDee might not let any of us attend Gareth’s funeral, but fortunately, my Uncle Theo stepped in and smoothed things over with her. In the end, most of my Nilsson relations were there. Grandma Rika buzzed around on a motorized scooter, terrifying two nurses who had been hired to watch over her. Uncle Theo and Aunt Dawn were there, along with their sons Conrad, Philip, and Bennet. My cousin Selinda came by herself, which was not surprising. Aunt Trudy was touring somewhere in India and couldn’t be bothered to come. She said she wasn’t good at dealing with death.
But I knew better. If she thought Gareth would leave her something in his will, she would have been there front and center.
The funeral was private with only family attending, but there was a memorial service open to the public and broadcast on the major television channels.
As I sat on an uncomfortable folding chair and listened to Gareth’s eulogy, I thought about all the good he had done with his life and the tragic waste of it being cut short. When they played a video with clips of Gareth speaking and a series of photographs, I looked down at my hands clenched together on my lap so I wouldn’t cry.
I also looked at my Nilsson cousins and thought it strange that Gareth was the only one of us who had gotten married. What was wrong with us? We were all in our early thirties now. I could understand Selinda not wanting to marry after her mother’s example, and I knew why I didn’t want to marry. But what about Conrad, Philip and Bennet? They had perfectly wonderful parents who loved each other and they didn’t seem to have any social disabilities.
Of course, Conrad was living the rock star life. He might never settle down.
It was good to see my cousins again, even if it had taken a tragedy to bring us all together. When we were younger, we saw each other at all the major holidays and at least once during every summer, but now that we were adults, busy with the business of making money, we rarely spoke. Philip talked about new developments for Nilsson Worldwide, including a new hotel in Hong Kong, and Bennet said he was working on a documentary on Grandfather’s life.
Better him than me.
Phillip teased Conrad and asked him if he was finished adding all the Norse tattoos yet. “I don’t know,” Conrad answered. “I’m a work in progress.”
When they asked what I was doing at Nilsson Technologies, I said I was thinking a lot, which made them all laugh.
It was a good-natured laugh rather than a mean one, but they didn’t understand. I could hire people to run my businesses; what interested me the most was product development. I spent much of my days researching and thinking. I might look like I was sitting and doing nothing, just staring into space, but inside I was thinking.
At the reading of the will a week later, we learned that other than a few bequests, the majority of Gareth’s fortune would pass to his baby daughter Chloe in various trusts, and that I would be awarded guardianship over her, to make all decisions for her physically and financially.
I sat stunned, saying nothing as DeeDee argued with the lawyer. “That’s impossible. What does Vidar know about babies? Absolutely nothing. I am Chloe’s grandmother. I should be the one to take care of her. That’s what Gareth would have wanted.”
But that wasn’t what Gareth had put in his will.
DeeDee had been Chloe’s caretaker since Gareth’s death. I believed that DeeDee cared for Chloe and that she had been an adequate grandmother, but I knew the real reason she wanted custody. Chloe’s estate was worth more than two billion dollars, and DeeDee wanted to have some control over that, especially since my father had left her only a few million in his will eight years before.
Did I want to be responsible for Chloe, a five-month-old baby? Absolutely not.
But I would respect my half-brother’s wishes. Taking care of Chloe was now my duty and I would become a father to her.
I vowed to do a better job than my own father had done.
DeeDee refused to relinquish custody of Chloe, so I had to get lawyers involved and file different petitions and restraining orders. She filed counter motions and it took a month before Chloe was released to my custody. I tried to keep our family squabble out of the news, but DeeDee liked attention and soon there were articles about the Billion Dollar Baby.
I made a public statement requesting that all forms of media refrain from publishing stories and pictures of Chloe until she was legally an adult. I wasn’t sure that was possible, but I wanted to avoid turning Chloe into another Gloria Vanderbilt. Her custody battle had been a circus in the 1930’s.
I immediately hired a psychologist and parenting expert to be my on-call advisor. I also hired a cook and Miss Jessica; the nanny Gareth and Yvonne had chosen. Poor Chloe must be confused by all the changes in her life, and I wanted to provide as much continuity as possible.
I brought Chloe back to Dallas, where I was most comfortable, and it was sufficiently far away from DeeDee in California that I hoped she wouldn’t stir up more trouble.
When we all arrived at Nilsson Tower, I relaxed for the first time in two months. It was good to be home, As Miss Jessica carried Chloe into her newly decorated bedroom to get her settled, I walked into the kitchen and glanced at the refrigerator. No yellow sticky notes.
When I opened the refrigerator door, I hoped that there might be some homemade chicken soup, but the carefully stock shelves seemed to mock me.
No soup from Nicole.
I wasn’t even certain she still worked at Nilsson Tower, and I knew it would be awkward to ask.