The Nanny

42. Paige

Sundays have become my least favorite day. It's not just the endless sense of counting down, but it's also Ash's demeanor after he returns from Toby and Flora's house. I don't know if he comes face-to-face with Imogen every week—I can't bring myself to ask—but the shadow of her lurks over him when he returns.

This week when Ash gets home from football, we're swept into our regular biweekly routine. Tejinder and Diya come for dinner with their significant others. Diya has her flavor of the week, and Tejinder is still with the same woman from Christmas, but there's something missing between them. Ash thinks Tejinder is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. He wants a relationship so badly that he'll take anything that seems like a close approximation. In the past, I've been him. Accepted people in my life who weren't a good fit in some ways because they were good in others. Hoped it was enough.

Then I stopped accepting anyone.

Until Ash.

The dishes are done, and Ash is still putting the kids down while I sip a glass of the leftover wine from dinner. We often take turns reading them books and putting them to bed now while the other either cleans or tidies the house. The house is never as clean or tidy as I want it, but I've come to accept that two children are each their own natural disaster, spewing chaos wherever they go.

When Ash joins me in the living room, he has a glass of water, which isn't like him. At some point, we became the kind of couple that unwinds at the end of each day with exactly one alcoholic drink each. Granted, we both had wine with dinner, but he almost always follows it with a beer.

"No drink?" I ask.

"Have you heard anything from your company about whether you're staying on?" He glances at me before setting his water on the coffee table in front of us.

My heart pounds because there's nothing casual about the way he asked. There's so much weight behind the question that I'm surprised by the heaviness.

"HR mentioned on Friday that they definitely need me until the end of April. An extra month for sure." I set my wine beside his water, deciding that I need every brain cell to navigate whatever is coming.

He leans forward and runs his hand along the back of his neck. There's a tension in him that's either new or I missed it in the hustle and bustle when he got back from football.

"Just an extra month?"

"So far, yeah."

"Do you expect there will be more?" He shifts on the couch to face me, but he doesn't quite meet my eyes.

"What's going on, Ash?" It's the perfect opportunity to tell him about the potential competing offers from Michigan and here, but since I don't have both of them in front of me, the one from the UK might not even be worth mentioning. If I mention Michigan, I might as well get out a hammer and nail the coffin of us shut. That's the feeling I'm getting right now—that we're on the verge of being buried.

"Imogen and Toby were on me about a few things while I was there today."

"Okay." I stretch out the word, unsure whether I really want to ask. Since I also talked to Toby, I don't need a blow-by-blow about what he'd be preaching. Leave Paige. Get back together with Imogen. 

"I'm feeling a bit conflicted about what's best for Chloe." His gaze meets mine briefly before flying away again.

There's a lump in my throat, and I can't speak for a minute. He doesn't elaborate, and I realize he's going to make me ask. "What do you want?"

"Don't know what I want." His voice is gruff.

But he says it in such a way that I think he does know, and the real problem is that he doesn't know how to tell me. That's fine. I won't make him. Truthfully, I am not sure I could stand to hear it anyway. He's been so honest up to this point that it's hard to fault him for trying to protect my feelings. It must be obvious, maybe painfully so, that I'm in this much deeper than him.