Private Property (Rochester Trilogy 1)

I blink, taken aback by his outburst. It’s maybe the first real thing he’s ever said to me. I realize this is not only about her grief. It’s about his. “Why would you say it’s because of you?”

He tosses the papers back at me, and I have to jump quickly to catch them before they fly around the room. “Do the work,” he mutters. “Make her do it. Make the crows outside do it. See if I fucking care who does the worksheet, but get her to pass first grade—or get on a plane back to Houston and say goodbye to your salary.”

CHAPTER NINE

I wake suddenly, sitting up in the dark, sweating.

Something happened. A dream? I can’t remember anything. Only blackness.

The moon hangs high in my window. I peek at my phone. Two thirty a.m. There are a couple unread texts from Noah from our last conversion. Don’t do it, he says. It’s a fucking trap. The rich people trap. They get people like us to do their work for them.

It’s not like that, I type back with a swipe of my finger. It’s not about money.

He should be asleep, especially with an early shift at the grocery store tomorrow morning. But he replies back right away. It’s always about money.

I lie back down, wondering what woke me up. I keep my phone on silent, so it wasn’t his texts. The ocean rumbles outside, beating against the cliffside like a drum. It’s a soothing noise. Nothing that would startle me.

A sound comes, a sharp cry.

I sit up again and slide my feet to the freezing cold wooden floor.

By the time the sound comes again I’m already stepping into the hallway. A light comes on a few doors away, and I take a small step back. Mr. Rochester emerges from his room looking rumpled and sleepy and somehow more human than ever before. He’s wearing a plain white T-shirt that hugs muscles I’ve already seen. The plaid flannel pajama pants hang low.

He enters Paige’s room, and her crying quiets.

I’m not sure why I don’t just enter the room and announce myself, but I find myself creeping forward. Maybe I want to see what they’re like together, without me in the middle. Or maybe I want to give him a chance to build a rapport with her. He may have been fighting with her tooth and nail before I arrived, over Pop-Tarts and sweaters, but at least he had a relationship.

Now he mostly manages to avoid her.

“What’s wrong?” he says, his voice low. “Did you have the dream again?”

A sniffle. “It was different this time.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Silence, where I can imagine her shaking her head no.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep?”

“I’m afraid,” the small voice says, and my heart wrenches. This is the part that Noah doesn’t understand. Grief does not care whether you’re rich or poor.

It hurts us equally.

I step into the room then, and Mr. Rochester’s head half-turns to see me. “Do you want Ms. Mendoza to sit with you?”

There’s another wrench in my heart. Because he sounds so uncertain. It’s clear in this moment that whatever asshole things he says to me, he does care about this little girl.

“I want you both,” she says, so I sit down on the floor against the wall. I leave him to be the one to smooth her hair back from her forehead and check if she has enough water by her bedside.

She’s a small lump under the covers.

He sits on the edge of the bed.

“Do you want me to read a book to you?”

She shakes her head.

“Are you sure? I can pull something up on my Kindle. Investing Common Stocks or Fundamentals of Index Funds. I can have you asleep in minutes.”

She giggles. “No, Uncle Beau.”

“Then what should we talk about?”

“Mama used to sing to me,” she says, her voice shy.

There’s a long silence, and I tense, knowing that Beau Rochester has a thousand sharp words in his mouth. He could slice her to ribbons without meaning to. “A song, huh?”

She nods.

“I’m not sure I even remember how to sing,” he says slowly. “It’s been a long time since I sang anything at all. What would your mother sing to you?”

“Taylor Swift.”

He lets out a low laugh. “I definitely don’t know the words to her songs.”

“Well then, what songs do you know?”

I eye him dubiously. What kind of music does a man like Mr. Rochester listen to? Hard rock? Heavy metal? It matches his intensity, but I can’t quite imagine him rocking out. Maybe something more adult. Classical music. Opera? That would fit his wealth and this outrageous mansion, but he seems too primitive to appreciate those things.

Maybe it’s the water banging against the rocks that’s his music. Something elemental.

“There was a light far away,” his voice comes low and soothing. “I followed the water’s gift. But when the night turned to day, I ended up adrift.”