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Delaney let herself be towed. She didn’t crouch. She let a little girl drag her across a meeting room to a bulletin board and then asked a real question about what was on it and stood there until the answer was done, including the section on the dragon’s position on municipal water policy.
She never checked my face to see whether she was doing it right.
A lot of adults had handled my daughter. The good ones got down on the floor and did the voice and made a project out of being at her level, and Iris tolerated all of it and forgot every one of them inside a week.
When the bulletin board was done she walked back to her chair and sat down, and Iris climbed into her lap before anybody could have stopped it and started Gerald’s origin story from the beginning.
Delaney’s arm came around her, loose, no grip in it. Iris leaned back against her like she’d been doing it for years, heels knocking the chair leg twice and then stopping, her weight settled back into a stranger’s arm.
My daughter didn’t lean on people she’d only just met.
Cole had my elbow and I hadn’t seen him cross the room. He got me into the corridor and pulled the door most of the way shut.
“She’s great,” he said.
“She works for me.”
“Eli. I know. I’m saying she’s great with Iris. That is the whole sentence.” He straightened his jacket. “I watched her come through a door and I watched you watch her come through a door. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Get back in there.”
He went back in, chin up, completely pleased, and I let him have it.
Through the gap in the door my daughter was delivering Gerald’s complete taxonomy at full volume, and a woman I’d met that morning was asking a follow-up question in a voice that was only interested, with no angle in it for my benefit, and the building smelled like rubber and cold air, and two halls over a skater was cutting a turn on fresh ice, a long scrape of an edge, then nothing behind it.
I’d spent a full season in that building and I knew every sound in it. Her voice through a door was a new one, and I’d started listening for it.
You shouldn’t hire this woman.
Then I walked back in and hired her.
Delaney was still in her chair with Iris in her lap. Gerald had been positioned on the table in his preferred orientation for being addressed directly. Maren was against the wall with her arms folded and her eyes up on the ceiling tiles, which was what Maren did when a situation ran according to her plan.
“The job’s yours,” I said. “Casita is ready whenever you are.”
Delaney lifted her eyes from my daughter.
“One more thing.” I put both forearms on the table. “You’ve got a sublet. Keep it. I’ll cover it out of my end for as long as you’re with us.”
That got her attention off Iris entirely.
“That’s not a thing people do.”
“It’s a thing I’m doing. You’re taking a job that’s also a house. If it goes wrong, or you hate it, or you wake up in four months and want your own four walls back, I’m not going to be the reason you can’t have them. You keep the place until you decide you don’t want it.”
Maren quit studying the ceiling tiles and looked at the floor instead, fast.
Delaney sat with that for a second, and then her chin lifted.
“And if I take it and then leave in a month?”
“Then you had a month’s work and I had a month of somebody good,” I said. “Rent’s cheaper than what I’ve been paying in canceled sitters.”
“Okay,” she said, and turned straight back to the Gerald briefing without any ceremony at all.
CHAPTER 4
Delaney
