Chapter six _ not your business.

CAMILLE

"Say that again."

Zack's voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go before. Not loud,just quieter,which somehow made it worse.

I stood a few feet back, still holding Brian's bath things, watching a muscle move in his jaw like it was doing work his face wasn't ready to explain. Whatever came through that phone wasn't good. I had seen him cold,seen him furious, once, gripping my shoulders hard enough to bruise. But I had never once seen him look like this, like something had reached in and found the one wire that actually mattered to him.

What scares a man like that, I thought. I genuinely didn't have a guess.

"No." Flat and final. "Don't do anything until I get there."

He hung up without saying goodbye. Just pulled the phone away from his ear and stood there a second, staring at nothing, like the call was still happening somewhere behind his eyes.

"Is everything okay?"

He blinked, and the second I asked, something shuttered closed on his face. 

The fear folded itself away so fast I might have imagined it, except that I had not. I knew what I saw.

"It's handled."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now." He said it the same way he had said it in the dream, except this wasn't a dream, and the words landed with a weight they hadn't carried there. He looked at me, really looked, in a way that felt less like assessment and more like worry.

 "Go check on Brian."

"Sir…."

"Camille." He said my name in a way which meant he was done arguing. 

"Please."

I went. What else could I do? But I felt his eyes on my back the whole way down the hall, and when I glanced over my shoulder once, he was still standing there, watching me leave like he was cataloguing every step, like something might happen to me between the study and Brian's door.

It didn't sit right. None of it sat right.

I spent the walk to Brian's room turning it over. Had the call been about my mother? About the hospital, the strange non-answer I'd gotten about who'd paid part of her bill? I couldn't make the pieces line up into anything that made sense, and by the time I reached Brian's door I had mostly given up trying.

Zack found me an hour later, in the hallway outside the bathroom, Brian's laughter still echoing from behind the door where I left him splashing more water onto the floor than into the tub.

"It has nothing to do with you," he said, without preamble, like he'd been rehearsing the sentence the whole way there. 

"Whatever you're imagining,it isn't that."

"How would you know what I'm imagining?"

"Because you have the same look my accountant gets right before he tells me something's about to go badly wrong." A small, tired, almost-smile.

 "You don't need to worry about this one."

"That's not really your decision to make."

"No," he agreed, and something in the way he said it made me think he actually meant it. 

"It isn't. I'm asking you to trust me on this one anyway."

I didn't get the chance to answer. Brian's voice came through the door, calling my name, half laughing, half demanding, and whatever this conversation was about to become got swallowed by the much louder business of getting a six-year-old out of a bathtub before he flooded the hallway.

Brian was clingier than usual that evening. He wanted his hair brushed even though it was already dry. He wanted a second story even though I had already read the first one twice. When I finally tucked him in, he grabbed my wrist before I could stand up.

"You won't leave again, right? Like my mom and dad did?"

The question landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for. I sat back down on the edge of the bed.

"I'm not going anywhere, Brian."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

He seemed to accept that, releasing my wrist, curling onto his side with the particular boneless trust only kids manage. 

I sat there a minute longer than I needed to, watching him drift, and didn't notice Zack in the doorway until I stood to leave.

I don't know how long he'd been there.

"He doesn't do that with most people," Zack said quietly, once we were both back in the hallway, the door pulled mostly shut behind us.

 "The attachment. He's careful with people”

"He's a good kid."

"He is." Zack was watching me with that same cataloguing look from the hallway that morning, except now there was something warmer folded into it, something that looked almost like realization.

 "You're good with him. I don't think I've said that."

"You haven't."

"I'm saying it now."

I didn't quite know what to do with that, so I said nothing, and the silence between us held a beat too long before Mrs. Smith's voice cut through it from the top of the stairs.

"Zack,A word."

He didn't move right away. When he finally did, his hand brushed my arm, brief but deliberate, gone before either of us could call it anything.

*********MRS. SMITH POV.**********

I had seen it from the balcony. Not the brushing hand, I wasn't quick enough to catch that but the rest of it. 

The way he'd lingered outside that boy's door. The way his shoulders had unclenched, just slightly, the moment he spotted her down the hall.

I did not raise my son to look at staff that way.

"She's an employee," I told him, once we were alone in the study, the door shut behind us.

 "A nanny. Nothing more, regardless of what your face was doing in that hallway just now."

"I don't know what you think you saw."

"I saw exactly what I think I saw." I poured myself a drink I didn't particularly want, mostly for the sake of having something to do with my hands.

 "You come from a certain world, Zack, She comes from another one entirely. Those worlds do not blend, whatever fantasy you're currently entertaining."

He didn't argue with me. That was the part that unsettled me more than an argument would have. He simply stood there, jaw tight, saying nothing at all, and his silence told me more than a denial ever could have.

I let it drop for the night. There was no use pushing a man who'd already decided not to hear me.

But after he left, I sat alone with my drink, turning it over, and admitted to myself what I had not wanted earlier.

This girl was becoming a problem.

I would have to find out exactly what she meant to my son, and exactly how far this had already gone before it became a problem I could no longer control.