Part 1A Ten Year Severance

I woke up at the bottom of the stairs, my head throbbing, the cold hardwood pressing against my cheek.

Marcus was sitting at the kitchen island just a few feet away, deep in a Zoom call. He didn't even glance up.

My ten-year-old son, Hudson, was scowling at his textbook on the sofa. "You just made me miss half my French tutoring session."

Looking at these two identical, ice-cold faces, a sudden, suffocating wave of anger washed over me. I had served this man and his son for a decade. I had just fallen and blacked out, and neither of them had bothered to ask if I was alive.

Spite flared in my chest. I sat up slowly, clutching my head, and feigned a concussion. "Who... who am I?"

Marcus finally stopped talking. He muted his laptop. For a fraction of a second, a crack appeared in his flawless, untouchable facade. I braced myself for his reaction, a twisted part of me hoping to finally see some panic, some care.

Instead, a voice answered from just outside my field of vision.

"The housekeeper."

I turned. Stella Monroe, Marcus’s executive assistant, was leaning against the doorframe, a takeaway coffee in her hand.

Marcus said nothing.

Hudson didn't look up from his iPad. "Can you go make lunch now? I'm starving."

Before I could even process the humiliation, Stella pointed a perfectly manicured finger at me. "You chipped the eighty-thousand-dollar custom floating steps. I'm officially informing you, on behalf of Mr. Hayes, that you're fired."

Marcus went back to his meeting. Hudson went back to scrolling.

The silence in the room was absolute, save for the hum of the refrigerator. I looked at the three of them. Then, I slowly nodded.

"Fine." My voice was eerily calm. "I want ten years of severance."

* * *

I looked down at myself.

I must have been unconscious for a few hours. I was still wearing my oversized, faded gray sweatpants and a stained t-shirt—the clothes I wore to scrub the baseboards because Marcus hated the smell of bleach from the cleaning service.

I really did look like the help.

I looked up. Marcus was still on his call. Hudson was reciting vocab words. They were treating Stella's words as gospel, treating me exactly like a servant who had overstepped her bounds.

I pulled myself up, my bare feet silent against the oak floors, and walked to the master bedroom. I pulled out a duffel bag and began folding my meager collection of personal clothes.

When I dragged my bag out into the hallway, Marcus was just wrapping up.

"I need those projections by tomorrow morning. We're done here." He snapped his laptop shut, grabbed his Tom Ford coat from the back of the chair, and shrugged it on.

He paused as he walked past me. "We're grabbing lunch in the city. There are some client portfolios on my desk. Alphabetize them and put them in the third drawer."

Hudson, struggling with his sneakers by the door, didn't bother looking at me. "My binder rings broke and I lost my flashcards. Find them before I get back."

It was seamless. The father and son tossing out orders, completely unfazed. As if the little performance earlier hadn't happened at all.

I felt my lips curve into a hollow smile. "I've been fired, remember? That's outside the scope of my employment."

Marcus stopped dead.

He turned, his dark eyes sweeping over me, lingering on the duffel bag in my hand. "Are you serious right now?"

"Deadly," I said. "Pay me."

His brow furrowed. "Pay you for what?"

"My back wages. As your housekeeper." I held up my fingers, calculating it out loud. "Market rate for a live-in nanny and housekeeper in this zip code is about eight thousand a month, plus room and board. I’ve put in ten years. If you’re terminating me without cause, the severance alone..."

Stella cut me off with a sharp, breathy laugh. "Quinn, I thought you had amnesia." She tilted her head, a smirk playing on her lips. "How do you remember exactly how long you've been leeching off the Hayes family?"

I raised my chin, looking at her properly for the first time. Young, gorgeous, impeccably dressed in a silk blouse. Sharp as a tack in the boardroom, but functionally an idiot when it came to reading the room.

"The photo on the credenza," I pointed. "It has a timestamp. 2014. It's been ten years."

It was the only family portrait in the house that included me. The year Hayes Tech secured its first hundred-million-dollar round of funding. Marcus stood dead center, radiating ambition and power. His parents, his sisters, his investors—they all crowded around him.

When the camera flashed, I—three months pregnant and exhausted—had been shoved to the very edge of the frame, half-blurred.

At that moment, Hudson turned around. He possessed a terrifyingly sharp intuition when it came to the mood in a room. He looked at me, hesitating. "Mom, what's wrong with you?"

He rarely called me Mom. Usually, he just yelled for whatever he needed. For years, I was the one chasing him, bribing him, loving him enough for the both of us just to hear him force the word out like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

I looked at my son, my voice devoid of warmth. "I'm not your mom. You should probably call me ma'am. Or better yet, call her Mom." I gestured toward Stella.

Hudson’s mouth pressed into a thin, furious line. He hated being corrected. Even his anger was a perfect carbon copy of his father's.

"Enough." Marcus’s voice cracked like a whip, irritation bleeding through. "What is this tantrum, Quinn?"

"No tantrum," I said.

Marcus stared at me, his eyes narrowing. "You hit your head. You're not thinking straight."

"I have never been thinking clearer."

"Then what the hell do you want?"

"My paycheck."

Marcus held my gaze for a long, heavy second. Then he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his phone, and tapped the screen a few times.

A second later, my phone buzzed.

A bank notification. $80,000.00.

Ten times the monthly amount I had quoted.

"That covers the month. Keep the change," Marcus said flatly. Then he opened the door and walked out, Hudson and Stella trailing right behind him.