Call Me By Your Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Help

Delilah humiliates Brynn in front of the staff; Brynn takes Jamie's hairbrush and he tells her his first mother did not want him.

Scott's house sat on a bluff above the lake, all glass and gray stone, with a gate that opened for me only after he said my name into a speaker.

It was six in the morning.

I had slept two hours.

I wore the only decent blouse I owned, and I carried a coffee Marge had pressed into my hand at the back door.

"Don't let him boss you," she'd said, adjusting my collar. "Men who pay nine thousand a month for a mop girl want something."

"It's an assistant job."

"Sure it is, honey."

A housekeeper let me in without a word and pointed up the stairs.

Scott's office was a corner room full of trophies he clearly never looked at.

He handed me a tablet with his week on it.

A practice at nine, physical therapy at eleven, a sponsor lunch, a bullpen session, a charity dinner Friday night.

"You'll come to everything," he said.

"Everything?"

"I said I want you where I can see you."

He turned to the window.

His back was very straight, and I thought I saw his shoulders tighten.

I looked away.

I was an employee now, and he was a stranger.

The doorbell rang downstairs.

It rang again, the long impatient way of someone who has never waited at a door.

I heard heels on the marble and a woman's voice.

"Scott, I'm here for Jamie. Where is he?"

I knew the voice.

My whole body knew it before my head did.

Delilah Hargate stood in the front hall in a white blazer with pearl studs.

Her blonde hair swung at her chin as she turned.

She hadn't changed much.

Her eyes were the same, cool and very blue, and they went over the hall and found me on the stairs.

For a second she didn't breathe.

Then she smiled.

"Well," she said. "Look who they let in the house."

Scott came down behind me.

"Delilah. He's with me until noon."

"I'm taking him early for school, Scott, and I see you've hired help." She walked toward me, slowly, her heels clicking. "Brynn MacAleese. The ticket girl."

The housekeeper and two teammates who'd come for a ride to practice had gone silent at the edge of the hall.

"Hello, Delilah," I said.

"You look..." She tilted her head. "Employed. I'm so glad. It's nice when people land somewhere."

One of the teammates snorted.

"Do you know," Delilah said, turning to the room, "I once knew this woman when she was nineteen and sleeping on the floor of a dorm?"

"Delilah," Scott said.

"I only mean she has a gift for finding men who'll take care of her." Delilah smoothed her blazer. "Honestly, Scott, you hire the cleaning girl? Is that how you're doing things now?"

My face was burning.

I wanted to say something clever.

What I said was, "Where's Jamie's school bag?"

Delilah blinked.

"What?"

"He needs it for school. I'll get it."

I walked upstairs past her, with every eye on my back, and found a small blue room with a bed shaped like a baseball glove.

Jamie sat on the floor in his pajamas, building something from plastic blocks.

He looked up.

"You came back," he said.

"I'm Dad's assistant now. I came to find your school bag."

"It's behind the door." He pointed. Then, "You smell like coffee."

"Is that bad?"

"No. Dad smells like that too."

I laughed, my first real laugh in days.

He held out a plastic piece to me and I knelt and set it where he showed me.

His hairbrush lay on the rug beside him with a few dark blond strands caught in the bristles.

I took it and dropped it in my bag along with the school bag, quick, before I could think.

There was a lab on Delancey Street that did paternity and maternity tests for ninety dollars.

It stood two doors down from the bus stop where I changed buses every night.

"Where did you work before?" Jamie asked.

"The ballpark. Cleaning."

"Do you like it?"

"I like seeing you there."

He thought about that with great seriousness.

Then he said, in the careful voice of a kid repeating something he'd been told, "Mom says my first mother didn't want me."

I stopped with a block in my hand.

"She said it's why I'm lucky to have her," Jamie went on. "Because my first mother just left."

I could not feel my fingers.

"Did she say that?" I asked.

"Uh-huh." He looked at the block in my hand. "Is that one the roof?"

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