His Mistress Called Me a Nanny Until My Husband Arrived

The Fall Festival at Noel's preschool smelled like cider and wet leaves. Strings of orange lights sagged between the maple trees, and somewhere near the face-painting table, a group of four-year-olds shrieked over a pumpkin that had rolled into the mud. I stood with a cup of cider going cold in my hands, watching Noel argue with another boy about whose pumpkin was bigger, and for a moment I forgot to watch anything else.

Then I felt it. That particular prickle at the back of my neck, the one that means someone's been looking too long.

Kameron stood near the entrance gate, half-turned toward a colleague's family, but his eyes weren't on them. They were on Noel. He wasn't smiling the way a stranger smiles at a cute kid running past. He was still. Studying. His gaze moved from Noel's face to his hands to the way he stood, like he was checking items off a list only he could see.

I told myself it was nothing. Then he started walking toward us.

"Blair." He said it easy, like we'd run into each other at a coffee shop. "Didn't expect to see you here. Small world."

"It's a preschool fundraiser, Kameron. Half of Manhattan's small world shows up."

His eyes dropped to Noel again, who'd abandoned the pumpkin fight and was now trying to climb the fence around the hay bales. "He's gotten big." A pause, just a beat too long. "How old is he now? Four?"

"Four," I said, and sipped my cider so I wouldn't have to say more.

"Four in March, right?" He said it lightly, like it was a guess, but it wasn't a guess. It was a fact he already had, and he was just watching my face to see if I'd flinch at the accuracy.

I didn't. "Something like that."

He crouched down before I could stop him, right at Noel's eye level, and Noel — who trusted everyone the way only a sheltered four-year-old could — stopped climbing and looked at him with open curiosity.

"Hey, buddy," Kameron said, voice gone soft and coaxing. "When's your birthday?"

Noel held up three fingers, then added a fourth like he'd caught his own mistake. "I'm four! I have a pawn!" He dug in his pocket and produced the little wooden chess piece, offering it up like proof of something far more important than his age.

Kameron's smile faltered, just slightly, at the word *pawn*. He didn't know what to do with it. "That's a good one," he said, and reached out like he might touch Noel's hair.

I stepped between them before his hand landed. "Noel, go find Mrs. Alvarez. She's got the good pumpkins."

Noel ran off without a second thought. Kameron straightened, and for a second neither of us said anything. The lights swayed overhead. Somewhere behind him, a kid was crying about a dropped candy apple.

"He's a great kid," Kameron said finally.

"He is," I said. "Have a good afternoon, Kameron."

I didn't look back to see if he watched us leave. I already knew he would.

That night, after Noel was asleep with the pawn still clutched in his fist, my phone lit up on the nightstand. A LinkedIn notification. *Kameron Stewart viewed your profile.* Then, eleven minutes later, again. Then once more, just after midnight. I stared at the timestamps until the screen dimmed on its own, and outside the window, rain had started, soft and steady against the glass, the kind of rain that doesn't announce itself, just arrives and stays.

I didn't mention it to Grey. Not yet.

Serena Voss ordered the branzino and didn't touch her wine until she'd said what she came to say.

"Maci's been busy," she said, cutting into the fish with the same precision she used on term sheets. "I heard it from three different people this week. Same story, every time. You're the nanny who got herself pregnant and never left the payroll. It's not just gossip anymore, Blair. It's a narrative. People repeat narratives."

"Let them."

Serena set her fork down. "You say that like it costs you nothing." Her phone buzzed on the table — her husband, probably, he texted her constantly, and she glanced at it with the easy, unguarded affection of a woman who'd never had to hide a single thing about her marriage. She looked back up at me. "When are you going to let Grey walk into a room with you? An actual room. In front of actual people."

I looked past her, out the window, at the gray wash of rain over Fifth Avenue, cabs bleeding yellow through the fog on the glass.

"Soon," I said. "Not yet."