Another half-truth. Liam was indeed in his office, had barely emerged since their conversation yesterday. Whether he was actually working or simply avoiding the inevitable fallout, she couldn’t say.
Maddie narrowed her eyes, more perceptive than her years warranted. “Why are you acting weird, Sunny?”
The directness of the question caught Sunny off guard. She’d planned to ease into it, wait until they’d eaten at least. But Maddie’s probing gaze left no room for delays.
Sunny set down the juice pitcher and took a deep breath.
“Girls, I need to tell you something important,” she began, her prepared speech evaporating as those two pairs of innocent eyes fixed on her. “Could you sit down, please?”
Hailey scrambled into her usual chair, immediately reaching for her juice. Maddie moved more cautiously, as if sensing the gravity of the moment.
“Is this about what Jamie’s mom said?” Maddie asked, her voice small. “That you’re going to leave?”
The question stole Sunny’s breath. Children absorbed everything, particularly the painful things adults tried to shield them from.
“I…” Sunny faltered, her knuckles white where she gripped the back of a chair. “Sometimes, grown-ups have to make very difficult decisions. Even when they don’t want to.”
Hailey’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What kind of decisions?”
Sunny’s heart pounded painfully against her ribs. Her hands trembled, and she pressed them flat against the table to hide it.
“I have to go away,” she said finally, the words scraping her throat like broken glass.“Today.”
The silence that followed stretched between them, fragile and dangerous. Hailey’s expression remained puzzled, as if the words didn’t quite translate. But Maddie — Maddie understood immediately, her small face draining of color.
“For how long?” Hailey asked, innocently.
Before Sunny could answer, Maddie stood abruptly, knocking over her juice glass. Orange liquid spread across the white tablecloth like a slow-motion disaster, but no one moved to clean it up.
“Please don’t leave us too,” Maddie whispered, her blue eyes — so like her father’s — swimming with tears. “Everybody leaves us.”
The simple truth of it, delivered with a child’s devastating clarity, broke something fundamental inside Sunny. She’d seen Maddie suffer the loss of her mother, watched her struggle to adapt to a world that kept shifting beneath her small feet. And now Sunny would be another adult walking out the door, another reason for Maddie to believe that love wasn’t permanent, that people couldn’t be trusted to stay.
“Sweetie,” Sunny began, taking a step toward her, but Maddie recoiled.
In that moment, Hailey seemed to fully grasp what was happening. With a wail of distress, she launched herself from her chair and wrapped herself around Sunny’s legs like a vise, her small body trembling with sobs.
“No, no, no!” Hailey cried, her face pressed against Sunny’s jeans, tears and snot immediately soaking through the fabric. “You can’t go away! You can’t!”
Sunny’s composure crumbled entirely. She dropped to her knees, gathering Hailey into her arms, feeling the child’s heart racing against her own.
“I don’t want to go,” she admitted, voice breaking. “But sometimes… sometimes adults have to do things that are very hard because they’re what’s best.”
“Best for who?” Maddie demanded, suddenly fierce through her tears. “Not for us!”
Sunny looked up at her, struggling to find words that wouldn’t be platitudes, that might somehow make sense of a situation that made no sense at all.
“Is it because of me?” Hailey asked between hiccupping sobs. “Because I broke the picture frame last week? I said I was sorry!”
“No! No, sweetie, it’s nothing you did,” Sunny said quickly, pulling back to look into Hailey’s tear-stained face. “Neither of you did anything wrong. This is… this is grown-up stuff. Things that have nothing to do with how much I love you.”
“Then don’t go,” Maddie said simply, as if it were that easy. As if love were enough to overcome everything else.
And oh, how Sunny wished it were.
“You promised,” Maddie continued, her voice dropping to an accusatory whisper. “You said you wouldn’t leave.”
The memory of that conversation stabbed through Sunny like a physical pain — Maddie asking if the rumors were true, if Sunny was going to leave like all the other nannies Jamie’s mom knew. Sunny’s carefully worded non-answer, her promise to talk about it later.
