My phone remained excruciatingly silent. By the time school was over, I was operating entirely on caffeine and anxiety.
The kids burst through the door and immediately started talking over one another.
“Did Winnie make monster muffins today?”
“CJ traded his pudding cup for Pokémon cards.”
“I think our PE teacher is getting divorced.”
I barely heard any of it.
“Have you heard from her?” Bianca asked suddenly.
All three kids went quiet.
I gripped the edge of the counter. “No.”
Billie frowned. “That’s weird.”
Yes, it was weird.
Very weird.
CJ leaned forward between the seats. “Maybe she got sick.”
The suggestion made my stomach drop unpleasantly. Some irrational part of me had never fully considered Winnie vulnerable before. She always seemed so composed. Unshakable, really. The idea of her alone somewhere, hurt or frightened, made something protective and ugly rise immediately in my throat.
Being inside our home all day had only made the absence louder. There was no tea steeping, no music drifting faintly from the living room, and no Winnie moving through the house in flowing black fabric while Billie followed her around asking deeply alarming questions.
The kids kept glancing toward the front door hopefully every few minutes. Each time disappointment followed. I tried working again while helping with homework. It went terribly.
CJ wrote an entire fake historical account about cursed pirates instead of working on his math. Bianca corrected my spreadsheet formatting without permission. Billie asked if raccoons could legally own property because she saw one near our trashcan the night before.
Usually, Winnie handled this chaos effortlessly. Without her, everything had tilted.
At six-thirty, I found myself standing in the kitchen staring at my phone again while pasta boiled over because I’d forgotten it existed.
Billie appeared beside me holding a dinosaur covered in marker. “You’re doing the fake calm again.”
I exhaled slowly. “I’m just worried about Winnie.”
Billie wrapped her arms around my waist. “She’ll come back, Daddy. She loves us.”
The certainty in her tone broke my heart.
I wanted to believe that. I really, really did. But something felt off.
And the worst part was I had absolutely no idea where Winnie even lived. Which suddenly felt like a catastrophic oversight for a man apparently in love with his children’s mysteriously disappearing nanny.
By seven o’clock, the entire house had fully descended into collective emotional instability. Bianca had stopped pretending she wasn’t worried and was now pacing in front of the living room windows, pretending to check weather conditions.
CJ had written three separate theories in his notebook titled: Possible Reasons Nanny Winnie Has Vanished.
Billie had openly moved into apocalypse mode.
“What if she got eaten by a bear?”
“There are no bears here.”
