twins down for a nap and was closing their bedroom door when her phone began to vibrate and warble in the back of her jeans pocket.
Lydia made sure the door was closed and the baby monitor on before she answered Jayne’s call and put the phone to her ear. “Hey.”
“Hey, how are you holding up?”
“I’m a nanny for now, so at least I can keep the roof over my head and food in my belly. How are you?” Lydia trudged downstairs with sandbags in her feet, grabbed her sandwich out of James and Emma’s fridge, then sat at the kitchen bar to have her lunch.
“Odette’s on two weeks’ stress leave, effective immediately.”
Lydia paused, her sandwich not fully out of its package. “What the fuck does that bitch have to be stressed about? She’s not even a teacher. She’s a preschool administrator. Parents breathing down her neck about why their three-year-old isn’t doing his times tables yet?”
Jayne made a noise of agreement. “That’s what we’re all wondering. Except …”
Lydia finished opening up her turkey and Swiss sandwich and took a bite. “Except what?”
“Except Reese made some offhand comment about you being the cause of her stress. None of us knew what he was talking about, and when we probed further, he shook his head, dismissed it all, jumped in his Jag and took off like he was late for his hair-plug appointment.” She snorted. “I wish the man would just embrace the bald.”
Lydia could attest that bald wasn’t bad—at least on some men. She wasn’t sure if her former big boss Reese Stone could pull off no hair like Rex could.
Thoughts of Rex made her melancholy, and she pushed her sandwich away. “Do you have any idea what Reese meant by that? How am I stressing Odette out? I don’t even work there anymore.” Her eyes went wide. “You don’t think the voodoo doll did more than give her diarrhea, do you?”
Jayne clucked. “No. I don’t even know if it did. I more just did that to help you feel better and get over being fired.”
She knew that, but there was still a thin thread of skepticism coursing through her that perhaps the doll had worked and perhaps a little too well.
“How’s the nanny job working out, darling?” She could hear Jayne chewing. She was probably on her fifteen-minute lunch break.
“It’s good. Kids are all great. The parents are great, too. But …”
“But it’s not what you want to be doing. It’s not what you’re highly educated to do.”
“Exactly.”
“We seriously need some rich guy to just say, ‘Hey, I’ll fund your preschool if you run it. Here, have all this money and teach the future.’”
“From your mouth to the universe’s ears.” She picked at a piece of turkey breast hanging from the corner of her sandwich and popped it into her mouth. “I think Rex and I are over.”
“What? Why?” Jayne’s voice had turned slightly shrill, and Lydia had to pull her ear away from the phone.
“He’s beginning to think that all the weird shit happening to me is of my own doing.”
“Like you pissed someone off, so they’re rightfully tormenting you?”
“No, like I’m doing it all to myself for attention because I’m lonely and lost.”
“Did he say that?” Jayne’s pitch was even higher, and Lydia pulled the phone away even farther with a grimace.
“No. Not in so many words. But he did say that he went and saw Dierks and that it can’t be him. Then he kept probing for information, like I have some deep, dark secret I’m keeping from him. He said he wants to believe me, but this is all very unusual and he’s trained to listen to his gut.”
“Fucking twat.”
“Well, no. I mean, I get it, but it still hurts.”
“Did you throw those accusations right back in his face?”
“I did. I said that none of the shit that’s been going on started happening until I met him, so what was to stop me from thinking it was him doing it all and getting his rocks off being the hero to save me? He didn’t like that very much, but it seemed to knock a little bit of sense into him. Do I think he’s the one doing it? Of course not. But when he accused me of doing it, I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut.”
“And I’m fucking glad you didn’t. Men need to be put in their place.”
Lydia snorted. “Yeah, well, his place probably won’t be the same as my place for much longer. I can already see the writing on the wall. He thinks I’m crazy, and what man willingly invites crazy into his life?”
“More men than you think, darling. And you are not crazy. He’s the crazy one if he lets a catch like you get away.”
Lydia exhaled a big breath through her mouth and stepped down off the barstool. “Thanks, friend.”
“Coffee and a walk soon?”
“Yes, please. I could use the distraction and friendship.”
“Always, love. You know I’m here if you need me.”
They said goodbye and hung up.
The twins usually napped for a solid two hours, so Lydia had an hour and forty-five minutes to tidy up. James and Emma said she didn’t have to clean, that they had a cleaner, but in all her years as a babysitter, she’d never left the home she was working in not tidy. She did dishes and swept, put toys away and whatever else. Plus, she needed the distraction.
Her head was spinning, thoughts colliding with each other. This didn’t make any sense. None of it did.
The person stalking her and tormenting her, Odette claiming that Lydia was the reason for her stress leave, and Rex accusing her of doing all the crazy shit to herself.
She reached for the broom from the kitchen pantry and started sweeping. Maybe if she just kept her head down and focused on work, all the bad shit in her life would just disappear. Like a fart on a breeze, her father used to say.
That thought brought a tear to her eye, and she wiped the back of her wrist beneath her nose. He’d been gone twenty years, but she still missed him. Still remembered him. Remembered his smell, his voice, his laugh.
Hank Sullivan had been an incredible father, and they had been a happy family. Until suddenly they weren’t.
He’d been taken from them far too soon, and even though they were okay now, she wasn’t sure she or her mother had ever fully recovered from his death. How do you recover when a piece of your heart is ripped out? The heart doesn’t regenerate that piece. It just heals over it with scar tissue.
Her father would know exactly what to do in this situation. He was a man who always had the right answer. Whether it was which chemicals when mixed together would cause an explosion or which unicorn was the most friendly in her Unicorn Party books, he always knew just what to say.
And she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d know what to do now.
Thoughts of her dad had her grabbing her phone off the counter and punching in her mother’s cellphone. Her mother always took her lunch between twelve and one. Most likely, she’d be sitting in the small lunch room at her office with her earbuds in and some feminist podcast playing in her ears while she ate her green salad with chicken breast, nuts and cranberries. Her mother was a very predictable creature. It was one of the things Lydia loved most about her.
The phone rang three times before her mother’s gentle voice broke through. “Hello, sweetheart, what a nice surprise.”
“Hi, Mum.”
And as predictable as Kim Sullivan was, she was also just as astute about her daughter’s moods. There rarely went a time when Lydia called and her mother didn’t pick up on something with just the tone of Lydia’s voice.
Now was no exception.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
Tears welled up in Lydia’s eyes. The broom dropped to the ground, followed by her, and the entire story tumbled from her nearly as fast as the tears fell.
By the time she was through, regaling her mother with her woes, Lydia’s heart felt lighter and her eyes burned from all the tears.
Her mother was very quiet, as she usually was. An exceptional listener.
Lydia used to tell her mother that she should go back to school and become a counselor, that she just had that calming way about her. But her mother would do no more than just smile and say she liked her job and that she didn’t want to make a living listening to other people’s problems. But she would listen to Lydia’s because Lydia was her daughter and she loved her.
“Lyle doesn’t live in Hope anymore, honey,” was the first thing her mother said.
Ice slithered down Lydia’s spine. “What?”
Was she still in contact with him? And if so, why? Had her mother been keeping tabs on Lyle, even now that Lydia was an adult?
“After what he tried to do to you, I kept tabs on him. Mr. and Mrs. O’Flanagan did too. He was quiet for a couple of years. Then, when you were about twenty, he just vanished. No body, no trace of him. We don’t know if he’s dead or alive, but we know he’s not in Hope anymore.” Her mother’s voice held a tremor to it that Lydia didn’t like. Her mother was worried.
“Do you think he’d come after me now? After all this time?”
“I don’t know, honey. I can’t answer that. I hope not. God, I hope not, but …”
“But …”
“But I didn’t think he was capable of what he tried to do to you, so who’s to say what he’s capable of?”
Lydia stood up from her pile of mental agony on the floor and reached for a Kleenex from the side table next to the couch in the living room. She blotted at her eyes and her nose. “Did you ever hear of Lyle taking up with any more women? Any more mothers with daughters?”
Her mother’s next words came out with such heavy regret, Lydia felt it all in her chest. “No. As much as I kept a bead on him, I didn’t pay attention to who he was seeing. I just wanted to know where he was. And the fact that I was a single working mother didn’t allow me the opportunity to be in the know at your school like some parents. I wasn’t there for school pickup, keeping up on all the gossip.”
Yeah, Lydia kind of figured that question would result in a dead end.
“All I want to do is hug you right now, honey. Wrap my arms around you and take away all this pain and confusion. I wish you’d called me sooner and told me all of this. I have vacation time saved up. I could have come and stayed with you. I still can if you want me to. I can be there by Monday. I just need to call the temp agency.”
Lydia blotted at her eyes and nose more before walking into the kitchen to toss the Kleenex in the garbage. “No, Mum. It’s okay. You save up those vacation days for your cruise with Aunt Molly. I know how much you’re looking forward to it.”
“That’s only two weeks, sweetheart. I have eight weeks. I can come if you need me to.”
As much as she wanted to see her mother, she also knew that there wasn’t much her mum could do. Plus, the last thing Lydia wanted was to put her mother in any kind of danger. Who knew what this freak was capable of and whether they would up their game to a dangerous—possibly lethal—level?
“I’ll let you know, okay, Mum?”
“Call me tomorrow? Let me know how you’re doing.”
Lydia inhaled on a stutter, and she swallowed the still very large lump in her throat. “I will. I promise.”
They ended their call with their usual declarations of love. Lydia glanced at her phone after she hung up. The twins would be up shortly. She needed to finish sweeping and get a handle on her emotions.
The girls were expecting their nanny to be happy and smiling, not crying her eyes out.
She finished sweeping and putting away the toys just as one of the twins started to make noise on the baby monitor. Ascending the stairs, she pulled her phone out of her pocket when it chirped and vibrated.
It was a text from Rex along with a link. Did you post this video of us?