Page 53 of The Perfect Nanny

With a sharp finger, I press the doorbell and inhale sharply, ready to hold my breath until the door opens. It’ll keep me from weakening and running off.

The wait feels like an eternity before the door opens. Lara stands in front of me, almost like a purposeful mess with her hair in a casual floppy bun on the top of her head. She’s in sweatpants and a stained gray T-shirt. No makeup. Just Botox-filled skin, plump lips traced with age lines and aging sunspots scattered along her cheeks. She peers down at the phone locked in her grip. “What are you doing here?”

Her throat can’t produce a smooth sound, each word crackles like radio static.

“I received your messages.”

“You could have responded,” she says.

“I can leave,” I offer.

“No, no,” she says with exasperation.

“What do you want from me?”

She flattens her free hand out in front of her, fixating on her fresh manicure—fresh as in, happened after her daughter went missing fresh. “Corbin is being detained. He took the blame—come inside. I can’t afford to have anyone else spying on us.”

I’m not supposed to know anyone was spying on them. “Spying?”

“Never mind,” she says, closing the door as I follow her into the house that has been giving me nightmares for days. “Wh-what happened to you? It looks like you were beat up.” She brushes her finger around in a circle on her neck, referring to the bruises on mine and lets out a loud hiccup.

“I was.” Following the hiccup is a face full of booze-laced breath.

She narrows her eyes at me as if I’m lying. What would I have to gain out of lying about the handprints on my neck? “By who?”

“Honestly, I was hoping you would tell me since everything that has happened to me in the past few days has been because of you.”

Lara presses her hands to the sides of her face and scrapes them down to her neck. “I didn’t know any of this was going to happen.”

I don’t believe her, and I don’t need to see a special look in her eyes to think so. “Why would Corbin just take the blame? And what did he take it for?”

“I—I do need your help with Madden. Tha-that’s why I hired you in the first place. She’s an angry, angry little child with mean thoughts and we don’t know why. We-we’ve treated her the same way we’ve treated Blakely, and now—and now,” she says, holding onto the last syllables as if they’re a tune, “I’ve had to send Blakely to stay with a friend to keep her safe while we work through everything.”

I close my eyes and shake my head. “What did Madden do, Lara?” She needs to tell me before I can say much else and it’s obvious she’s drunk.

Lara swallows hard and clasps her hands around her opposite wrists, digging her nails into her skin. “We—we um, think she brought-t-t Fallon down to the ocean and, splash-sh-sh, she just drowned.”

I don’t see how this is Madden’s fault. No one was watching her when she did this. She’s nine. Maybe she thought her sister could swim. Although, I recall Lara saying something about working on the twins still learning to swim. “It could have been a horrific accident,” I suggest. If that’s the case, Madden is going to need a lot more therapy than she might be considering.“And if this was a possible accident, why would Corbin take the blame?”

“It was-sn’t an accident,” she whispers, cupping her hand around her mouth. “Madden has des-spised Fallon’s existence since the day she was born. The warn-warning signs were there, and I was in denial.” She throws her hands up in the air then lets them drop to her sides. This story matches up to what I heard them arguing about the other night. “Corbin wanted to spare Madden from being questioned or from whatever might happen if someone thinks this was anything but an accident.”

“So, you tried to criminalize me?”

Her hands tremble. “I—I jus-s-t was-sn’t in my right mind.”

There are many things I can say to her, but none are as kind as she’s being to herself. “Did Madden tell you she thought she would drown if she took her swimming?”

A dull series of thuds echoes through the foyer, and I turn in the direction I hear it coming from. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” Lara says.

I hear the thuds again. “That’s not nothing. Where’s Madden right now?”

“In her-her room, where she belongs, Ha-ley. Where else would she be?” The thuds are fists pounding against a wall.

If they think Madden purposely drowned her sister, she should be speaking to a therapist, not locked in her room.

“I want to talk to her.”

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