Page 11 of The Bossy One

“It’s lovely. Wait, is that…?” Olivia said. She ran a reverent hand over one of the chairs. “I saw one of these in a museum once, in an exhibit about the Gilded Age. And now one’sin my bedroom?”

I shrugged. It looked like a chair to me.

I half turned to the door. “Anyway. Let’s go—”

“What hours would you like me to work?” Olivia interrupted, then bit her lip. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt. But I have a few questions about the work expectations. I find it’s normally best to clear those up early, if that’s all right with you?”

“It is.” I crossed my arms. “What do you want to know?”

She pulled out a small notepad from her sweatshirt pocket and a pen from her messy bun. “My contract gives you 50 hours a week of my time. When would you like to use them?”

“When I’m at work. But my schedule varies.”

She opened her mouth like she wanted to press for more info, but then she snapped it closed, scribbled something in her notepad, and moved on to her next question. “What’s Catie’s daily routine look like?”

Fuck, I thought.I have no idea.

“She can do what she wants. She doesn’t need a routine.”

Olivia’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s…are you sure?”

I wasn’t. “Do you have any other questions?”

Oliva sighed and added something else to her notebook. I got the sense I was being evaluated—and failing.

“Is there any subject in school she’s struggling with?” Olivia asked. “Anything she could use some extra tutoring in during the summer?”

“She’s smart,” I said defensively.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t smart,” Olivia said in a placating tone. It made my hackles rise even more. It felt like she was trying to manage me. I’d spent enough of my early career trying to manage inept bosses to know when someone else was trying to do the same. And I didn’t need her disapproval.

What if she’s right? What if you’re a bad caretaker for Catie?I squashed the thought.

“Any dietary restrictions?” Olivia chirped. Her smile was bright, but she was clenching her pen so tight her knuckles had turned white.

That answer I knew. “None. But you don’t have to worry about what she’ll be eating. My chef makes lunch and dinner.”

I heard a crash from another room.

“Uh-oh,” Catie said, her voice sounding farther away than the hallway.

Even I knew that was a bad sign.

I ducked into the hallway and followed Catie’s voice to my office. Catie stood in the center of the room, staring down at the floor, where my work laptop’s screen was bent at an unnatural angle.

She looked up at me, eyes wide with the fear of getting in trouble. “I was trying to dry it off. After the water spilled on it.

I winced. Sure enough, a half-filled mug I’d forgotten about lay on its side, water spreading rapidly across my desk.

“Shit, shit,” I muttered, as I yanked off my sweater and did my best to sop up the mess before it could reach anything else important on my desk. Olivia jumped into action beside me, grabbing files of paper and moving them away from the spreading water. We got everything cleared away before I had to resort to stripping off my T-shirt as well.

When we’d finished, I looked at my laptop and winced. It wasn’t the cost of replacing it, it was the hours of work I’d just lost. Normally I backed everything up at the end of the day, but my last workday had been interrupted by Sinead’s call for help.

Catie’s lip trembled, and I realized she was trying not to cry.

“Hey, hey,” I said, kneeling in front of her to give her a hug. “It’s all grand. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll fix it. Brave girls don’t cry, right? Can you be brave for me?”

Catie nodded.

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