Chapter 1 - The Song I Shouldn’t Have Known
“No,” I told him. “I’m just more frightened of an infected wound than I am of you.”
Adrian Cain looked at me for a long moment.
Then, unexpectedly, he lowered his eyes to the flour covering my apron.
“You have unusual priorities.”
“I’ve been told.”
I pressed clean gauze against his arm. Up close, he looked younger than he did at the breakfast table, where men in expensive suits waited for permission to speak. Thirty-five, perhaps. Exhaustion had settled beneath his eyes, and there was a narrow white scar near his chin.
The cut needed more attention than I could give it.
“You should call a doctor.”
“One is coming.”
“Good. Then my medical career ends here.”
I secured the temporary dressing and stepped back.
His phone lit up on the counter. He glanced at the message, typed something with his uninjured hand, and set it facedown.
“You haven’t asked what happened.”
“I’m the nanny, Mr. Cain.”
“Adrian.”
“I’m the nanny, Adrian. My job description covers your nephew’s homework, meals, and arguments about wearing a coat. Whatever happened to your arm falls outside my qualifications.”
“And yet you ordered me into a chair.”
“You were bleeding on the floor.”
That almost-smile returned.
I turned toward the sink before he could notice how much it affected me.
My name was June Bennett. I was twenty-seven, had sixty-four dollars in my checking account when I applied for this job, and had spent the previous year watching the preschool where I worked slowly run out of money.
Cain House offered an absurd salary, health insurance, and a private room.
I had accepted before asking enough questions.
By the second day, I understood why the previous three nannies had left.
The guards were intimidating. The rules were exhausting. Every delivery was inspected.
But Leo was neither difficult nor spoiled.
He was lonely.
Eight years old, with serious gray eyes and a habit of checking the hallway before he laughed, he lived in a house where adults lowered their voices whenever his mother’s name came up.
Elise Cain had disappeared nine months earlier.
Her car had gone through a barrier and into the river during a winter storm.
They never found her.
Nobody had told me that during the interview.
Leo told me himself while we assembled a model airplane.
He said it the way another child might mention a missing mitten.
“My mom went into the water.”
I had sat beside him without knowing what to say.
Now, in the midnight kitchen, I rinsed blood from my fingers while Adrian watched the doorway.
The radio crackled through the end of an old Motown song. I switched it off.
Without thinking, I began humming the little tune Leo had taught me that afternoon.
He called it the Lantern Song.
I didn’t know all the words, so I sang the verse he liked best.
“Eight bright candles, a wish come true,
Pepper stole the cake from you…”
Behind me, the chair scraped sharply against the floor.
I turned.
Adrian was standing.
Every trace of amusement had vanished.
“Where did you hear that?”
I looked at the bandage, afraid it had slipped.
“What?”
“That song.”
“Leo taught me.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. We were making paper lanterns.”
His face had gone so still that I felt my own pulse change.
“What else did he teach you?”
“The part about keeping a light in the window. I don’t remember it exactly.”
He crossed the kitchen.
Not quickly. Somehow that was worse.
“Tell me the words you just sang.”
I repeated them.
He gripped the edge of the island.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then he asked, “Did Leo tell you where he learned that verse?”
“From a recording of his mother.”
Adrian shut his eyes.
I felt a coldness spread through my chest.
“Was I not supposed to sing it?”
He opened his eyes and looked directly at me.
“My sister wrote that song when Leo was born. She added a verse every birthday.”
I waited.
“The last birthday she spent with him was his seventh.”
I looked toward the ceiling, toward the room where Leo slept with a stuffed fox tucked beneath his chin.
“Perhaps she wrote the next verse early.”
Adrian shook his head.
“Pepper is his puppy.”
“I know.”
“We adopted him three months after Elise disappeared.”
I stopped breathing.
“And the cake?”
“Leo’s eighth birthday. Last month. Pepper knocked it off the kitchen table.”
The room seemed to tilt around me.
Adrian pulled his phone from the counter.
“Who gave him the recording?” he asked.
I remembered Leo’s small, pleased smile. The secret he had whispered while we folded yellow paper.
A secret I had assumed was harmless.
“Your uncle,” I said. “Victor.”
Adrian stared at me.
Outside the kitchen, footsteps approached.
A man’s voice called gently from the hallway.
“Adrian? I heard you were hurt.”
Victor Cain appeared in the doorway wearing a dressing gown and the concerned expression of someone who had spent a lifetime being welcomed.
His gaze moved from Adrian to me.
Then to the abandoned radio.
“Everything all right?”
Adrian’s hand closed around his phone.
“Yes,” he said.
His voice sounded perfectly normal.
May you like
Mine would not have.
“June was just telling me about Leo’s birthday.”
