46
AT FIRST, I told myself I was seeing things. I saw Shannon whispering something to Nanny Aimee in the living room, the two of them exchanging a conspiratorial look, and I said to myself: It’s nothing. I watched her go on long walks with Clementine through the fields and the woods on her weekly day off, and I thought, How nice! I clocked her having lunch alone with Caleb on the front porch—first every once in a while, and soon practically daily—and I thought, Don’t think about it. I saw the way Caleb looked at her when she rolled her eyes and laughed at some dumb thing he said, and I noticed how their fingers sometimes touched when they had lunch, and then I looked the other way.
I ignored all this and more because I needed to, because I was four months pregnant with my sixth child and gaining thirty thousand followers a week; because Shannon was less of an employee, if I was honest, and more like my own two hands; because she could lock me out of my own account if she wanted to; because of the most basic rule of social media, as grounding and essential as the laws of gravity: you cannot fall backward in terms of quality.
For all those reasons and more, it was not a consideration I felt particularly eager to interrogate: why Shannon would suddenly be working so hard to seduce everyone on the ranch but me.
—
It went like this for months. Clementine started talking about oceans and cities. She wanted to go to California. She wanted to see the Pacific. As a form of compromise, I started taking her to Target once a month. Then the nannies came to me one day and asked for a raise, and even though I wanted to slap the lip gloss off their ungrateful little faces, I said yes immediately. All you had to do was ask!
And then one day, Caleb walked up to me and said, “Do we really need two nannies?” and I knew another woman had taken full control of Yesteryear Ranch.
—
Still—mercy—I didn’t let her go. And then Caleb walked into our bedroom late one night after the final milking of the day (ha, I would think later: a milking indeed) and said, “We need to talk.”