“But we’ll both be grateful for all the free babysitting,” Lexi says.
“Does she really still need a babysitter?”
Audrey presses her lips together, sharing a look with her mother. With Lexi’s red hair in a similar high bun, both of themwearing glasses—all three of them, actually, because evidently nearsightedness runs in the Navarro family—the resemblance is impossible to miss.
“Mom wanted me…to babysityou, kind of,” Audrey admits. “To make sure you have some company and don’t get too lonely.”
Nick’s eyes flick back and forth between them. “How could I be lonely when my two favorite people live right across the yard?” When they only crack halfhearted smiles at that, he takes a deep breath. “It’s obviously going to be a transition. But I promise, I’m fine. You aren’t going to hear ‘Everybody Hurts’ blasting from the guesthouse every night.”
“I can make you a much better breakup playlist,” Audrey says, and he has no doubt she can.
“If you really are going to babysit me,” he says, “can you at least take me out for ice cream if I finish everything on my plate?” He reaches into his pocket for his car keys and gently tosses them to his niece, who giggles as she catches them.
It’s true that he’s never spent much time on his own. He went from his childhood home to his college dorm to his first apartment with Kathryn, and he forced himself to pick up a dozen new hobbies this past year to reduce the amount of time he spent in the house. He joined a pickleball league. Took glassblowing classes. Burned his hand. Quit glassblowing. Started swimming early in the mornings at the UCLA pool.
Anything to keep the loneliness from catching him.
Lexi taps a finger on her chin. “Thereisthis new ice cream place we like just down the street,” she says, and Audrey can’t finish her curry fast enough.
He tries his best to be optimistic about the upcoming quarter,to be hopeful about this new living situation. Because maybe he’s no longer a husband, but he’s still a brother. An uncle.
Still, as the mid-September sun sets and blackberry ice cream melts on his tongue, he wonders if all he’s doing is delaying the inevitable: falling asleep in a strange new room that doesn’t hold any of the memories of nearly half his life.
—
The dean of the lifesciences department calls a meeting a couple days before the start of the quarter.
Nick is one of those saps who gets emotional about the beginning of the school year—he always has, ever since he was a kid. He’s already tidied his office, updated his exams and assignments, edited his PowerPoint presentations. He even hung a banner that saysGet Psychedon his office door, because as a psychology professor, he feels humor is a vital part of his job. He takes every opportunity to show his students that the subject can be both complicated and bizarre, its history full of colorful personalities. Freud is really only the tip of the iceberg.
Is the banner a little dorky? Sure, but this is academia—dorks proudly welcomed.
He doesn’t even dislike these meetings or any of the university red tape. Structure is exactly what he needs to move forward, and the optimism comes easy as he nods his hellos to the other two professors in the dean’s office, Fumiko Hayashi, who teaches marine biology, and Marshall Klein, who he’s never met but teaches philosophy in the humanities department. They all take seats in front of Dean Traci Eckhart’s desk as she waits for the printer to spit out some documents.
Nick crosses one leg over the other. He’s in chinos and a collared shirt, his thermos of coffee an extension of his right arm. At least he’s no longer living out of boxes, aside from the handful he’s not going to touch until he has his own place, and he’s been able to pick Audrey up from school every day so his sister can work a bit later. They’ll grab a bite to eat or grocery shop for Audrey’s next masterpiece or park themselves at the kitchen table while she does homework and he preps for class, struggling to remember the quadratic formula when she asks him about math. It’s the closest thing to a routine he’s had in months, and as eager as he is to meet his students, he’ll miss it.
“Welcome, welcome,” says Dean Eckhart, a petite middle-aged woman with a background in molecular genetics and a slight mistrust of technology. Case in point: she asks everyone to turn off their phones during the meeting so none of them can listen in. After they exchange pleasantries, she gets down to business. “I wanted to speak with you before you receive your most up-to-date class lists. We have a celebrity enrollment this quarter, and she’s in all three of your classes. Ramona Wilder.”
The name is so unexpected, it takes a moment to register. They have celebrity students not infrequently—some under the radar, some not—and Nick’s had a couple in class before. Most of them keep to themselves, as though worried about drawing even more attention, though toward the beginning of his career, he taught one young actor who asked such insightful questions and performed so well on his exams, Nick recommended him for one of his high-level psych seminars the next quarter. Instead, the guy left for Atlanta to shoot a Marvel movie.
Despite having lived in LA since college, Nick’s never been very interested in the industry. It’s always seemed like thisstrange, hyper-glossy behemoth that exists entirely outside his own life.
Marshall, the oldest of the three, with shoulder-length shaggy gray hair and a beard to match, leans forward in his chair. “Sorry, who?”
“She’s a singer,” Nick says. One of Audrey’s favorites, in fact. He took her to a concert a few years ago when Lexi came down with the flu. He remembers the throngs of screaming girls, how he regretted not wearing earplugs when he could barely hear the next day and decided this must mean he was getting old.
And now she’s apparently a UCLA freshman.
If he doesn’t have to sign an NDA, this is going to earn him some serious cool uncle points.
“Former child actress, too,” Dean Eckhart says, passing around her printouts. “She was on a kids’ show called”—a squint down at the paper—“Greta Life!? Ah, I get it. Clever.”
Nick has to muffle a laugh. For as much as they tout the importance of proper research and vetting sources, the dean really just went and printed Ramona’s bio off Wikipedia.
“Very accomplished,” Fumiko muses, lowering chic reading glasses from the top of her head as she scans the printout. “I think my daughters listened to her when they were younger. Didn’t she announce she was retiring?”
“Could be a publicity stunt,” Nick says. That was his first thought when the news broke, and Audrey spent half the day in her room sobbing into a pillow. Didn’t celebrities do that kind of thing all the time, declare they were retreating from the spotlight only to create buzz for a comeback?
Dean Eckhart lifts her eyebrows at him. “It’s not our job topass judgment. This is a delicate situation, and we want to give it the gravity it deserves.”
