“I’m the one who needs to apologize. My, uh, dog is still learning his manners,” Sam said, and thought it would be a good thing if his owner remembered his. “But please come in, have a seat while we talk. I can lock Bandit up if you want.”
“Oh, no, the dog is fine. I love dogs, remember? Really.” Katie started to follow Sam into the house, with Bandit hot on her heels.
“You can come with me,” Libby said. She put her hand in Katie’s and tugged her down the hall. “My father says I gotta be nice to people who come over to the house.”
My father. Not Daddy. He hadn’t heard Daddy, or even Dad in a long time. He bit back another sigh.
“And he’s supposed to be nice, too,” Libby added, giving Sam a pointed glare.
Katie looked up at Sam and smiled. She had a nice smile. A really nice smile. “Is that so?”
“Yup. ’Cuz sometimes he’s grumpy,” Libby added, thumbing in the direction of Sam.
Sam groaned. That was the problem with kids. They said too much and always at the wrong time. “I’m not grumpy. Just...stressed.”
“How come?” Libby asked.
He ruffled his daughter’s hair. She stiffened, an almost imperceptible amount, but the distance was there. The easy relationship he’d had with his eldest had also disappeared in the last year and a half. Sam put on a bright face, pretending, as he always did, that he didn’t notice. That they were all just fine. “Because some people feed their breakfast to the dog.”
Katie bit back a laugh. “My brother used to do that.”
“Not you?”
“Of course not. I was the good one.” Katie smiled when she said that, which sent his mind spiraling down a couple paths that were not appropriate for interviewing the tutor. Yeah, he definitely had been alone too long. That was all it was.
Sam cleared his throat and gestured toward the dining room table. The kitchen was a mess—as was typical pretty much every day of the week—with dirty dishes piled in the sink, breakfast crumbs scattered across the table and countertops, and a set of muddy paw prints running circles around the table. They never used the dining room, which meant it was relatively clean, if he ignored the light coating of dust on everything. “Libby, go watch cartoons with Henry.”
“But I wanna—”
“Go watch cartoons with Henry. Please.” He prayed Libby wouldn’t argue, that she would just do what he said.
Libby stood her ground a moment longer, but then the sounds of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck drew her into the other room. Sam had a brief moment of peace in his house, which meant he’d better get this interview done fast, before Katie realized things here were actually more like a zoo, and she ran out the door, like more than one nanny he’d interviewed.
“Is there any chance you also want to be a nanny?” he asked, only half joking. Still no text back from Charity.
“I’ve never been a nanny, or a tutor,” she said. “I’m a CPA, but I’m...looking for a new direction for now. I’m in town for a couple weeks while I think about my career options.”
A CPA? What had Della been thinking? Talk about overqualified for the job.
“Do you have any experience with kids?” He should have realized that when she showed up on his doorstep. Any tutor in her right mind wouldn’t be wearing heels and a figure-hugging pencil skirt.
He glanced at his phone again. Nothing from Charity. Damn. The last thing he wanted to do was take the kids with him. He’d had to do that a few times with client appointments and the results had been...disastrous to say the least. He was still paying for the marker decorations that Henry had drawn on a custom-made leather sofa in one client’s office. It was almost impossible to carry on a conversation of any kind of substance with the kids in the room. And for him to show up at an interview with them...
He might as well kiss the job goodbye. “You know, maybe we should reschedule. This is a crazy busy morning for me. If you could come back—”
“No!” Libby’s shriek cut through the air like a knife. “No!”
Sam bolted out of the chair and charged down the hall, his heart a tight ball in his throat. He never should have left the kids alone in the living room. This was how awful things happened, and if there was one thing that would break Sam, it would be one of his kids getting hurt. Or worse. Please be okay, please be okay.
It was probably only ten yards from the dining room to the living room, but to Sam, it felt like ten thousand. “Libby? You okay?”
“Henry took my bear when I was playing with it! He’s hurting him! Tell him to stop!”
It took Sam a second to process the fact that Libby and Henry were both fine. Just engaged in a tug-of-war over a stuffed bear. Libby’s voice was at decibels usually reserved for rock concerts, the sound nearly outpaced by Henry’s screams. No words, just the frustrated screams that Sam had heard too much of in the last year and a half.
“Henry, give Libby back her bear.”
But Henry didn’t listen. Instead, he tugged harder, at the same time that Libby tugged in the opposite direction. There was a horrible tearing sound, and then an explosion of fiberfill in the air. The kids tumbled onto the carpet, each holding half a bear, like some kind of biblical division of property.
The sobs multiplied in volume. Libby was screaming at Henry and Henry was screaming back, and Sam just wanted to quit. Quit being a terrible father. Quit being the chief everything when he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Just run away somewhere that was quiet and peaceful and clean.
His wife would have known what to do. Wendy had had a way with the kids, a calming presence that seemed to bring everyone back to earth in seconds. God, he missed her, and how she could handle all these things that he sucked at. Wendy would have known whose bear that was, but Sam—Sam couldn’t even remember buying the bear.
“No!” Libby screamed again. “Look what you did, Henry! You ruined him!”
While Sam stood there, at a loss, with two kids in the throes of tantrums, Bandit ran into the fray and grabbed a chunk of bear, then darted into the corner like he’d scored a new chew toy. And Libby started to sob.
Great, just great. Now how was he supposed to fix this?
He stayed immobile, frozen with indecision, afraid of doing the wrong thing, making it worse. Katie brushed past him. “Don’t cry, Libby. I can sew this,” she said, bending down in the space between the kids. “Fix him up as good as new.”
Libby swiped at her nose with the back of her arm. “You can?”
Katie nodded while she gathered up the fiberfill and began stuffing it into the bear’s belly. Henry quieted, too, and just watched, eyes wide. “I learned how to sew when I was your age. If you want, I can teach you how.”
“He doesn’t know how to sew,” Libby said, jabbing another thumb in her father’s direction.
Katie shot Sam a grin. “Some daddies don’t and some mommies don’t. But if I teach you, then you’ll know and next time you can fix—” she tapped the bear’s decapitated head, then turned to Henry “—what’s his name?”
Henry just stared at her. His fist clenched around the puff of stuffing.
“A bear’s gotta have a name.” Katie smiled at Henry, then inched closer. Sam started to go in there, to stop her, to tell her Henry was just going to run from her, but Katie kept talking, her voice calm and soft. Mesmerizing. “When I was a little girl, I had a bear like this one. I used to get scared a lot when it was dark, and my big brother, Colton, would find my bear and bring it to me. He would tuck me in and tell me stories until I stopped being scared and