Chapter 1

“The guy in Fishing was a total moron,” Rodriguez says.

Rodriguez is my assistant store manager and my best outdoors guy at Mike’s Sporting Goods, the store I’ve managed in a north-of-Seattle suburb for the past five years. Rodriguez and Brooks, my top sports-equipment guy, and I are standing in enemy territory—the parking lot outside the brand-new Big Win Sports chain store, which had its grand opening this weekend. The three of us just finished posing as Big Win customers, trying to figure out how deep a bite of our business the new store is going to take.

Our intel is pretty discouraging. Big Win stocks everything we stock, more or less. And in larger numbers. For lower prices.

Perfect ad copy, right? Shop at Mike’s. Find less, pay more!

Rodro shakes his head in disgust. “This guy didn’t know anything about where to go. He didn’t know anything about tying or casting.”

“The guy in racket sports tried to sell me a beginner’s racket even though I said I was a three-times-a-week competitive advanced player,” Brooks says.

“It’s not a bad thing if their customer service sucks,” I say reassuringly. But I’m feeling pretty grim. For one thing, Big Win is depressing—badly lit, huge and echoey, and stocked with cheap merchandise, which means that just being in there is enough to tank my mood. Worse, bad lighting and crappy design won’t be enough to stop it from leaching our profits. And while we’re doing okay with Mike’s, I wouldn’t say we’ve got a huge buffer against disaster. We operate pretty close to the bone. Mike—the owner—likes to do things the way they’ve always been done, and as times have changed I haven’t always been able to convince him to keep up.

I sigh. I’ve got to come up with a better pep talk if I’m going to wipe those defeated expressions off my guys’ faces.

“We’ll figure it out,” I say, doing my best to sound convincing and mostly succeeding. “I’m not going to let Big Win fuck up Mike’s business after fifty-five years.”

Brooks and Rodro look doubtful but a little less like I ran over their dogs.

I meant what I said: I’m not going to let the business fail. For one thing, I love this store—have loved it since I first walked in and felt like I’d walked straight into the store my parents owned when I was a kid—the most at home I’d felt since leaving Texas for college.

But my love for this place aside, there is no way I’m going to let Big Win be the thing that proves my parents right about how out of my league I was, taking on this job.

I pull my keys out. “All right. Thanks for the recon. We’ll talk strategy tomorrow.”

“You have time for a beer?” Brooks asks.

I must give something away with my hesitation, because Brooks smirks. “You got a date?”

I shake my head. “Nah. But Liv’s bringing Katie and me takeout.”

Brooks narrows his eyes. “You’ve got to explain this to me. How Liv’s bringing you takeout is not a date.”

“It’s not a date because Liv and I are friends. Like you and Rodro and I are friends. So if I eat a pizza with y’all, it’s not a date.”

“But Rodro and I aren’t a hot red-head with an amazing rack,” Brooks points out.

My friendship with Liv is an endless source of fascination to my guy friends, who pretty much just can’t believe I could hang around her and not want to—their words—tap that.

It’s not that the thought hasn’t ever crossed my mind. Liv is, as they rightly point out, hot. Gorgeous, actually. Long and lean and leggy, but soft in all the right places, with porcelain skin and a killer smile. It’s that I’ve become expert at not acting on it, because acting on it would fuck up a good thing. Which would be fine if it would lead to another good thing, but that’s not Liv and me. Plus, redheads aren’t my type.

“I’ve told you, Liv and I would make the worst couple on earth.”

At some point, I should tell Brooks and Rodro the whole story of how Liv and I met and got to be friends, and why exactly we could never be a couple, but I told the nanny I’d be home by 7:00 and Liv said she’d try to show up around 7:30, so now’s not the time.

“So, you wouldn’t mind if Rodro or I asked her out?”

“Nope,” I say.

Brooks raises his eyebrows, but I just wave him off. I’ve taken so much shit about Liv since we became friends three years ago, I almost don’t hear it any more.

We walk toward my truck and Rodro’s Suburban.

“How’s the family hauler treating you?” Rodro asks, eyeing my new four-door pickup.

When Katie came to live with me, I had to sell my beloved old Silverado and buy a new truck—because the older model pickups aren’t configured right for little kids in carseats—and Rodro and Brooks both know it was a huge kick in the balls when I was already down.

I shrug. “Didn’t have much choice. The Silverado wasn’t safe.”

They’re both looking at me with pity. Just about a month ago, Katie’s mom—my very much ex—was killed in a car accident while Katie was at ballet class. My life was turned upside down. I went from being an occasional visitor in Katie’s life to being an actual dad in the blink of an eye. And Katie—and her constant sadness—became my full-time responsibility.

“How’s Katie doing?” Brooks asks, and I have to look away from his sympathy.

“She’s—” Fuck it. It’s too complicated to get into. “She’s doing good.”

As if to punctuate my bald-faced lie, my phone chimes with the nanny’s ring. I apologize to Brooks and Rodriguez, who wave me off, and answer the call. “Chase here.”

Celia, the nanny, says, “She’s crying again.”

For the hundredth time since Celia started two weeks ago, I wonder if I’ve screwed up by hiring her. Even though Celia gives off a Mary Poppins vibe, and even though Liv—who’s also a nanny—said she’d heard through the grapevine that Celia was good, I’m not buying it. Celia calls me every time Katie cries, asking permission to give her candy or put on TV shows—both of which I try to limit—and that just doesn’t seem right. Shouldn’t Celia be able to comfort Katie some other way? Or to distract her with a song and dance, a story, a craft project? Isn’t that what professional nannies do? And last night, when I tucked Katie into bed and asked about her day, she told me she doesn’t like Celia.

Why not, baby?

I’m not a baby. I’m a big girl.

You are a big girl. You’re my big girl. And I love you lots. Now sleep tight.

I told myself Katie wouldn’t like anyone who was trying to take her mom’s place right now. Her dislike for Celia wasn’t specific.

Now, however, guilt sandbags me. It’s bad enough to lose your mom and be saddled with a clueless dad without getting left all day with a nanny you don’t like.

“I’ll be home in fifteen minutes,” I tell Celia, exhaustion crashing down on me. The weight of Big Win and Katie’s grief and how I have no idea what to do about any of it. “Put on Frozen.”

That goddamn movie seems to be the only thing that works.

I hang up.

Brooks and Rodriguez are both eyeing me with pity. There’s no point now in trying to pretend things are okay. “She’s asking for Thea,” I tell them.

“Shit, Chase.” Brooks shakes his head.

“I’m sorry, man,” Rodro says.

I just nod. Because words aren’t my friends right now. Words haven’t been my friends at all the last month.

Brooks claps me across the shoulder.

I drive home, pull into the driveway, and jog into the house. I can hear the sounds of Frozen coming from the living room. When I go in, Katie is sitting on the couch, attention glued to Olaf’s antics.

Celia is sitting in an armchair nearby, asleep.

Shouldn’t the nanny be awake when she’s on duty?

“Thanks, C,” I say, startling her awake. “I can take it from here.”

Most nights since Celia started I’ve asked for a debrief at the end of the day, but she never gives me much. Today I don’t even bother.

“I’ll be in my room if you need me,” Celia says, and retreats, wafting past me in a cloud of the breath mints she lives on.

I thought having a nanny would make things easier, not harder. That having someone else living in the house who knew kids would help me figure things out. Make me feel a little less in over my head.

It’s not that I never spent time with Katie before. But it was a couple of hours here. An overnight there. A soccer game, a ballet recital. Thea kept Katie so busy with activities: pee-wee sports, trips, and playdates.

Thea had Katie, and Thea and Katie had their mom-and-kid friends and their ways of doing things, and whenever I tried to do anything other than be a spectator, I felt a lot like I was clomping around Thea’s delicate herb garden in hip waders. Feeding Katie the “wrong” food or letting her watch the “wrong” movies. It was maybe the only time in my life when I’ve felt that downright wrong-footed, and the few times I got in Thea’s face about it, about how maybe there wasn’t a right and wrong way, she reminded me in no uncertain terms that she’d never asked for my help.

True enough.

So now I’m figuring it all out more or less from scratch. And I’m doing okay, I’m doing, for fuck’s sake, the best I can, but—

Well, I was hoping having a professional around would help, that’s all.

I watch Katie for a moment, trying to take a breath big enough to whisk the ache out of my chest but not succeeding. Her brown eyes are red-rimmed, her face still shiny in places where the tears haven’t finished drying, her blond hair limp and damp.

I sit down next to her and pause the movie.

“Daddy,” she protests.

I give her a hug and a kiss. “Did you have a good day with Celia?”

“I don’t like Celia,” she says, craning her head as if that will make the movie start up again.

I almost just press play. But something makes me ask, “What don’t you like about Celia?”

“She smells funny.”

I’m relieved that it’s that, a quirky kid objection, and not something I need to really worry about, like, She yells or She hits or She’s mean.

“That’s just her breath mints,” I say.

“Can you start the movie again?”

I hit play. Then I go into the kitchen and pull my bottle of Dalwhinnie off the liquor shelf.

I’m midway through pouring myself two generous fingers when I happen to look up at the liquor cabinet and notice that I’m almost out of Kahlúa. Which is weird because I remember buying it right after Christmas, and I can’t remember using it since then.

A lightbulb goes on in my head.

I start pulling down other bottles.

Certain things I know for sure. I hate rye, so I’m not the one who drank the Bulleit 95 I keep shoved near the back of the cabinet for Brooks. I bought the elderberry liqueur to make chick drinks for this woman I was dating who was a sucker for them, but things petered out between us before she ever made it through my front door. So there should be almost a full bottle, not just dregs. And I swear to God there used to be a bottle of sherry in here—can’t even remember why—but it’s gone.

She smells funny, Katie said.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I gather a handful of bottles by the neck and head up the stairs, where I knock on Celia’s door. She opens it.

Confrontation doesn’t bug me. You have to have good boundaries to manage a business. But at the same time, asking your nanny of two weeks if she has been in your liquor cabinet—it’s awkward.

So I’m pretty grateful when she saves me the trouble. She takes one look at the bottles in my hand and says, “Oh, shit.”