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It shouldn’t be this hard to find a reliable caretaker for an eleven-year-old girl in London. But Evie’s long-time nanny Tabitha retired two years ago, and it’d been a revolving door of disasters ever since. The replacement candidates either couldn’t connect with Evie, only wanted the job for its proximity to fame (aka me), or—worst of all—overstepped my boundaries by trying to turn a professional arrangement into something personal.

The ironic part was, none of the women wanted me. They wanted Noah Wilson, the top goalkeeper for the Blackcastle Football Club. They wanted the athlete who’d made waves as the only American in the Premier League when he moved to the UK a decade ago, and who would take center stage for the US at this year’s World Cup. My single dad status and commitment to staying out of the press only increased my desirability in their eyes.

But if they knew Noah the man, and not Noah the footballer, they’d hate me. I loathed being famous. I didn’t like the press, and I rarely went out. I was too cautious to have fun when I did, and I was too closed off to connect with anyone I didn’t already know.

Underneath the accomplishments and headlines, I was a huge fucking mess, but no one had ever gotten close enough to figure that out. It was both a blessing and a curse.

My bedroom door creaked open again. I lifted my head just in time to see a small face peek around the wooden frame.

“Daddy? Is everything okay?” Evie asked. She was still dressed in her school clothes, and her eyes scanned the room with open curiosity.

I forced my shoulders to relax. “Everything’s fine, sweetheart. I’m sorry for disturbing you.” I patted the seat next to me. She immediately barreled into the room and climbed onto the bed, her weight a reassuring presence by my side.

I smiled despite my earlier frustration. Evie had reached the age where she was starting to hang out with her friends more than her family, so I didn’t take our nightly catch-up sessions for granted.

“Are you done with your homework?” I asked.

“Almost. I only have a worksheet left for maths.” Although Evie was technically American, she’d grown up in the UK and spoke like a Brit, hence the “maths” instead of “math.” She bit her lip. “I heard you and Hazel arguing. Is she coming back?”

“No, she’s not.” I leveled her with a stern stare. “But you already knew that when you told her she could come into my room.”

Evie shifted. “I didn’t say that exactly…”

“But you implied it.”

She looked down, her cheeks pink with guilt.

I softened. It was hard to be mad at her when I was the reason she had to deal with countless nannies in the first place. “In the future, if you don’t like your nanny, you can just tell me,” I said. “You don’t need to engineer other reasons for me to fire them.”

“I didn’t dislike her. She was okay. But she was constantly talking about you on the phone with her friends, and I disliked that.” Evie picked at the hem of her skirt. “Besides, you already fired Julie and Maddy because I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to be the problem again.”

A lump formed in my throat. She may be eleven, but she was more mature and observant than people twice her age. It often felt like she was parenting me instead of the other way around.

“You are never the problem,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how many candidates we have to see. If you’re not comfortable with them, let me know. We’ll find the right person eventually.”

“Will that be before or after I go off to uni?” She squealed when I ruffled her hair in mock retaliation. “Dad! Stop! My hair!”

I laughed, but she had a point—about the timeline, not the hair.

She was turning twelve this year. Soon, she wouldn’t need a nanny anymore.

I tried not to think about it, or about the milestones I’d already missed because I’d been busy building my career.

“Tell me about your day,” I said, switching subjects. “What’d you learn in school?”

For the next twenty minutes, Evie caught me up on her day and all the relevant gossip. It was her best friend Briana’s birthday next month. Her family was organizing a trip to Brighton to celebrate, and Evie had been begging me to let her go.

“Alright, it’s getting late, and you still have to finish your homework,” I said once she finished. “We’ll discuss Brighton later.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I kept my smile intact until Evie left the room. She didn’t know we were out of staffing agency options for a nanny, which meant I had to take drastic measures.

I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice.

I pulled out my phone and went to the one place I usually tried to avoid at all costs: the Blackcastle group chat.