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“That would be great!” Will said with a big smile. “You don’t have any more exams to do?”
I shook my head. “I have an assignment to finish but maybe I could do that in the mornings when Zoë is in school?”
“Of course! I have no idea what Shelley used to do then…” his voice trailed away.
“Sounds good to me!” I said quickly.
“Do you want to come round on Sunday evening, get settled into your room?”
Just like that, my worries around work and money were sorted. Will proposed a very generous salary, considering that I had no proper experience as a nanny. I was surprised by how approachable and friendly he’d been, quite different to how I remembered him.
I recalledan evening a few years back when I was headed out with some guy and Will had come by to pick up Simone. We’d had the most awkward conversation at the front door, he had been looking everywhere but at me and had seemed almost annoyed.
I even talked to Simone about it later when I got back.
“Is your brother weird, or is it me?”
“What do you mean?”
I told her about what had happened earlier in the evening.
The two of us were in the kitchen, making hot chocolate and talking about our evening.
She laughed and shook her head.
“It’s definitely not you,” she said.
“He probably wants you to stay with someone smarter, not some idiot whose biggest skill is folding cocktail umbrellas!”
“No, no!” Simone laughed. “He’s not great around people, especially around girls. Not to mention hot girls!”
“I’m hardly a hot girl,” I protested. “But what about you? He’s used to you, right?”
“I’m his sister!” Simone yelled.
“But surely you brought friends round the house when you were growing up? What about that friend of yours, Tasmin? She’s beautiful!”
“Will was always in his room, coding or playing games or something. He hardly ever came down,” Simone said. “He especially made a point of not coming out if I had friends over.”
Then she said. “I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend.”
“But he’s got a daughter!” I exclaimed. “Surely there was a woman around for that!”
“But she wasn’t his girlfriend,” Simone said, looking at me meaningfully.
“He never really told us what happened, and we didn’t want to push him too much. I figured he’d tell me in his own time, but that never happened. He told us one day that he was expecting a baby with some woman and that he would be raising her. By then, he had his money and his own place, and we accepted that.”
Simone said he never brought Zoë’s mother around to visit and neither she nor her mother had ever met her.
“You never met her?” I couldn’t quite believe it.
Simone shook her head.
“I don’t think I actually believed there was a woman, come to think of it,” Simone said. “Then one day, he came to the house with the baby. She was so tiny! He was completely freaked out, said she wouldn’t stop crying, what should he do?!”
Her mother had taken the baby and sent him out with a list of things to buy. Diapers, formula, plastic bottles, even clothes.
“I think he came straight from the hospital with her,” Simone said. “It was like the mother had just handed the baby over to him.”
