I set down my fry. "That face is not a good face."
She points at her face. “This one has charmed many patrons.”
I laugh. "Natasha."
She exhales. "Okay. So. You know how I mentioned that the Callaghan's have been talking about selling the bar?"
I nod. The owners of Brookhaven Brews are an older couple who've been making retirement noises for the better part of a year and are wholly terrible at managing the place we’re currently seated in. Natasha has been quietly, methodically saving everything she can toward the possibility of buying it herself, which would be the least surprising thing that has ever happened because this bar is essentially already hers in every way that matters.
"Yeah. Is something happening with that?"
"It's moving faster than I thought. They want to finalize something before the end of the year." She says it simply, but I can see the excitement mixed with nerves in her eyes. "Which means I need to be fully available to take over operations. All hands, all the time, no distractions. It’s going to be a lot of work."
"Natasha, that's amazing. Seriously."
"It's going to cost me a lot."
I hear the worry in that statement. Time. Money. Relationships. I’ve never owned anything, but I can already see the weight of it on her.
"You'll figure it out. You always do."
She nods once, accepting this, and then the tension around her eyes comes back. "So, here's the thing. A few months ago, beforeany of this accelerated, I promised Boone Tremblay I'd help with his brother's daughter. Nanny stuff. Pickup from volleyball practice, homework help, getting her settled before her dad gets home and the occasional overnight stay when he’s away for work." She pauses. "I told him yes and then forgot to mention it to you, and then the bar situation got serious, and I realized I absolutely cannot take that on right now."
I blink, knowing where this is going. "Okay."
"So, I told Boone that my roommate would do it instead."
There's a beat of silence.
"You told him—" I stop. "Natasha. You volunteered me for a nanny job without asking me first?"
"I knew you'd say yes."
"You didn’t know that."
"You literally just told me you're on a struggling new-grad budget and you have your mom's medical bills to deal with on top of everything else." She raises an eyebrow. "He's paying fifty dollars an hour."
I open my mouth and close it again. Fifty dollars an hour is not nothing. Fifty dollars an hour is more than I’m making with the Mayhem and when you're staring down a debt that feels like enough to fund another doctorate degree and trying to do it on an entry-level salary while refusing your wealthy father's money on principle. My mother didn't have good insurance. The last eight months of her illness cost more than I let myself think about too directly, and the bills that came after she was gone landed on me because there was nobody else to handle them. I’m an only child. She never married. And therefore, I’ve been trying to chip away at the bills ever since.
It hasn’t been going well.
Fifty dollars an hour would help make a dent.
"It's Boone's brother," I say carefully. "Seth Tremblay?" My mind goes back to the night we met when he told me he had a twelve-year-old daughter.
"Yeah." Natasha tilts her head slightly. "You know him?"
The question hangs in the air, and I choose my next words carefully.
"I work with the Mayhem," I say. "He's a player."
"Right." She doesn't push it, which is one of the things I love about her. She's not nosey, she just understands that some information comes in its own time. "So, you know who he is. Good. That makes this all so much simpler."
It makes it the opposite of simpler.
Because what Natasha doesn't know, what I have not told her, is that Seth Tremblay is not just a player on my father's team. He's the man I had a spectacularly ill-advised one-night stand with ten months ago, at a mandatory Halloween event, dressed as a character from a movie, on the same night I made the decision that moved me to this town.
He's also the man I ran into last night at the team dinner, who I spent an hour with in a hotel gym fighting over angel food cake and letting bench press me while I managed a full internal crisis, who I then let kiss me in a way that I haven't stopped thinking about, and who I am now almost certain realized exactly who I was right before I bolted out the gym door like my clothes was on fire.
