Page 1 of Worst Nanny Ever
CHAPTER ONE
TRAVIS
A scream rips through the house, loud enough that the noise-cancelling headphones I’m wearing don’t do jack.
I hurl myself out of bed, forgetting the rumpled blankets wrapped around my legs and plunge headfirst onto the floor, face-planting hard enough that my forehead bounces off the wood flooring.
Yup. That really hurts. But I can’t focus on the pain because my son is still screaming. It feels like the sound is inside of my head. It’s the wind powering my anxiety tornado.
Is there an intruder?
Or…is Ollie dying? Maybe he has some awful medical diagnosis his mother didn’t disclose to me when she dropped him off on my doorstep a month ago with nothing but a single suitcase.
Is he homesick?
Does he miss his mother?
Then there’s the other, more persistent, thought—I’ve known I’m a father for all of a month, and I’m already failing.
I stagger to my feet, my head aching, my headphones askew. The sound of my band’s music is still blasting out of them. Ithrow them onto the bed and charge out the door with renewed determination and the beginnings of a really awful bruise just beneath the birthmark on my forehead.
A few seconds later, I burst into Ollie’s bedroom.
It’s not pitch dark, because there’s a night-light in here, purchased after he woke up weeping on his first night in my house. I’d felt like a jackass for not realizing most kids his age are afraid of the dark. Though I work with children in my after-school music program, The Missing Beat, they’re all older than Ollie. Teenagers. I’ve discovered there’s a world of difference between seven and thirteen.
Thanks to that night-light, I can see my son’s wide eyes. His serious little face. For a second there’s no recognition in his gaze, but at least he stops screaming.
“Oh, it’s you, Travis,” he says after a moment. He sounds disappointed, like he’d really hoped an intruder would have come in instead.
My head is throbbing, my breath coming in pants.
“Are you okay?” I ask in a gush, leaning over to catch my breath.
“No,” he says, his little cheeks pink, his eyes shining. “I just had a nightmare that my mother left me at a stranger’s house, and I woke uphere.”
Well, shit. I don’t know what to say to that. There’s no denying it’s true. Up until just over a month ago, I didn’t know I had a son, and Ollie thought he had a different father.
“This is your home,” I say, because it sounds comforting.
It’s also true. Right now, my house is the only home he has.
Years ago, his mother Lilah left me for a very rich, very old record producer before she realized she was pregnant. Her solution was to marry him and pretend Ollie was his child. He and Ollie had both believed it up until last month. The truth hadcome out thanks to one of those home DNA tests and a justifiably suspicious family who hadn’t wanted his millions going to Lilah.
The geezer had thrown them both out, as if all of the years he’d spent with Ollie had meant nothing.
Asshole.
I did one of those DNA tests too, after Ollie came to live with me, and it confirmed that he’s my son. I didn’t really need the test, though. He could have stepped out of my childhood photos. Looking at him stirs up memories I’d thought I’d made peace with years ago.
“This definitely isn’t my home,” he says, folding his knees up and wrapping his skinny arms around them. He looks so painfully small like that, wrapped up like a pretzel. It hurts to look at him, to want to protect him but not knowhow.
I sit at the end of his bed. The spare bedroom still looks the same as it did when he first arrived—a double bed with a white comforter, a nondescript bureau, a desk with a chair, and a framed photo of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Why don’t we go to the store and get some stuff for your room?” I suggest, not for the first time. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“No,” he says, tightening his arms around his legs. “My mom’s going to come back.”
Not anytime soon, she’s not. She made it very clear it was my turn with Ollie—indefinitely—and then boarded a plane to Australia to follow her new boyfriend’s band.
