Chapter 2

"Who is he?"

Paulette snorted a laugh. "Say it out loud and it'd scare you to death!"

I watched her mock me and forced down the anger, my voice going cold. "Are you leaving or not?"

Seeing that I meant it, Paulette couldn't help laughing again.

"Marilyn Gray, I'm the James family's nanny. In this house you're the outsider. What right do you have to throw me out?"

She rolled her eyes at me when she finished, wouldn't even bother sweeping up the shards on the floor, and just scooped Toby up behind her to leave.

As she passed me, she muttered under her breath, "I'll drive you crazy yet!"

"All you know how to do is call Neil and tattle, isn't it? Go on, hurry up and call him and cry about it!"

She left me standing in the living room, staring at her back.

I didn't call Neil.

I called Paulette's daughter, Grace Abbott.

"I don't care what you're doing. Drop it, and get over here right now to take your mother and her kid away!"

"Marilyn, what happened?"

I said, "One more thing. You'd better bring two million with you."

I hung up before Grace could get a word in, whether she'd caught all of it or not.

Before long her car pulled up outside the villa.

She pushed the door open, saw me sitting on the sofa with a face like a storm, the vase fragments right by my feet, and forced a thin smile onto her face.

"Marilyn, who got you this worked up?"

I couldn't be bothered explaining.

"Save the useless talk. Pack up your mother's things, fast. She's out of my house today."

Grace frowned, and her tone dropped the courtesy.

"Do you even know who my mother is? And you're just going to throw her out?"

That actually made me laugh. I was in no hurry to send her off now.

"Who she is? Tell me, what could a nanny possibly be?"

Grace's breath caught, but she swallowed it and switched tack.

"Does Neil know about this?"

I said flatly, "I fire a nanny and I need Neil's permission for it? You think far too highly of your mother's place in my house."

Then I pointed at the fragments on the floor.

"Don't think I'm joking. That vase was two million. You don't pay for it, you can wait to be sued!"

And with that, right in front of Grace, I called the police.

Grace didn't panic in the slightest. She even sat down on the sofa to face me off.

"It's only two million. We can afford that. But you say two million and it's two million? How do I know you're not shaking us down?"

Paulette had been in my house for over a decade, on more than thirty thousand a month. Over all those years, two million really was within their reach.

But what gave them the nerve to strut like this in front of me?

To just sit right down?

Who exactly had put that kind of backbone in them?

The thought hardened my face, and my voice came out ice-cold.

"That's the appraisal department's job. You've got a problem, take it to court with them. What are you telling me for?"

"'We can afford it, we can afford it.' And the second you actually have to pay, it hurts?"

"No money, but you've still got the nerve to bring people into my house? Get a clear picture of exactly who and what you are!"

"Stand up! Did I say you could sit? That sofa is worth more than your life!"

Under my tongue-lashing Grace stood, her face cycling through red and pale.

We were both young women. Who was really beneath whom?

The gap in money is a chasm, but few people will humiliate the poor so openly.

I hadn't wanted to. But Grace, dead broke and rattling with it, still insisting on acting a rung above me in my own house, turned my stomach.

I wouldn't have minded even meeting as equals. But she'd smashed my vase, I was about to fire Paulette, the very pillar holding her whole family up, and she was still swaggering?

Grace put on a look of contempt, even brushing at nonexistent dust off her backside.

"Sat on it? I've laid on it too! You think I want it? This thing's filthy. You're the only one who doesn't mind."

"I don't believe for a second you can get rid of my mother. I'm going to Neil!"

Even Paulette couldn't fix this. A nanny's daughter going to Neil, what the hell was that going to do?

But after Grace left, whether it was in my head or not, I suddenly caught a strange smell off the sofa.

That, on top of the way this mother and daughter had carried themselves, and the things they'd said, and a sense of foreboding started rising from somewhere deep in me.

Looking at the vase fragments scattered across the floor, I picked up my phone and made a call.