Nanny's Child Broke My Antique, I Demanded Millions Instantly

Intro

Our nanny leaned on the fact that she'd raised my husband, so when I told her not to bring anyone into the house during work hours, she ignored me.

She looked after her three-year-old grandson while she worked.

Right up until the boy smashed an antique I'd won at an overseas auction.

Marilyn Gray, dear, Toby broke a vase by accident. No harm done, right?

My voice came out cold. "Two million dollars. When are you wiring it to my account?"

Paulette Glass, our nanny, had no sense of boundaries at all.

She leaned on her seniority and never treated herself as an outsider. She'd even cast herself in the role of my mother-in-law.

Sometimes she'd order me around too. If Neil James hadn't kept telling me she was nearly sixty and about to retire, I'd have fired her long ago.

I'd told her more times than I could count not to bring outsiders into the house during work hours. She never took it seriously.

Now that Toby had caused real trouble, Paulette was finally scared.

"Marilyn, you're not really going to hold a grudge against a child, are you?"

I couldn't help but frown.

"Paulette, let's keep this strictly business."

Her mouth twisted. She didn't like that.

"I'll pay for it, but Marilyn, you can't shake me down either!"

"Who's to say whether that vase is even real? Two million dollars, and you just leave it sitting out in the living room"

She wasn't finished, but I couldn't hold back and cut her off.

"I have the purchase receipt, and I won this vase while I was on my honeymoon with Neil out of state. If you won't believe me, surely you'll believe Neil?"

Paulette rolled her eyes at me. "The most I'll pay is two hundred."

For a second she'd left me speechless.

"You open with shaking me down for two milliondoes Neil know about that?"

Her shameless act made me laugh out of sheer anger. "I paid for that vase at the auction with Neil standing right there."

"Fine, I'll call Neil and have him wire it to you."

Since reasoning with her was going nowhere, I just gave her my final word, cold and flat. "Paulette, pay the two million, or take your grandson and get out right now."

At that, Paulette stared at me in disbelief.

Then came the words that left me stunned. "Do you even know who the boy's father is?"

"Who is he?"

Paulette snorted a laugh. "Say it out loud and it'd scare you to death!"

I watched her mock me and forced down the anger, my voice going cold. "Are you leaving or not?"

Seeing that I meant it, Paulette couldn't help laughing again.

"Marilyn Gray, I'm the James family's nanny. In this house you're the outsider. What right do you have to throw me out?"

She rolled her eyes at me when she finished, wouldn't even bother sweeping up the shards on the floor, and just scooped Toby up behind her to leave.

As she passed me, she muttered under her breath, "I'll drive you crazy yet!"

"All you know how to do is call Neil and tattle, isn't it? Go on, hurry up and call him and cry about it!"

She left me standing in the living room, staring at her back.

I didn't call Neil.

I called Paulette's daughter, Grace Abbott.

"I don't care what you're doing. Drop it, and get over here right now to take your mother and her kid away!"

"Marilyn, what happened?"

I said, "One more thing. You'd better bring two million with you."

I hung up before Grace could get a word in, whether she'd caught all of it or not.

Before long her car pulled up outside the villa.

She pushed the door open, saw me sitting on the sofa with a face like a storm, the vase fragments right by my feet, and forced a thin smile onto her face.

"Marilyn, who got you this worked up?"

I couldn't be bothered explaining.

"Save the useless talk. Pack up your mother's things, fast. She's out of my house today."

Grace frowned, and her tone dropped the courtesy.

"Do you even know who my mother is? And you're just going to throw her out?"

That actually made me laugh. I was in no hurry to send her off now.

"Who she is? Tell me, what could a nanny possibly be?"

Grace's breath caught, but she swallowed it and switched tack.

"Does Neil know about this?"

I said flatly, "I fire a nanny and I need Neil's permission for it? You think far too highly of your mother's place in my house."

Then I pointed at the fragments on the floor.

"Don't think I'm joking. That vase was two million. You don't pay for it, you can wait to be sued!"

And with that, right in front of Grace, I called the police.

Grace didn't panic in the slightest. She even sat down on the sofa to face me off.

"It's only two million. We can afford that. But you say two million and it's two million? How do I know you're not shaking us down?"

Paulette had been in my house for over a decade, on more than thirty thousand a month. Over all those years, two million really was within their reach.

But what gave them the nerve to strut like this in front of me?

To just sit right down?

Who exactly had put that kind of backbone in them?

The thought hardened my face, and my voice came out ice-cold.

"That's the appraisal department's job. You've got a problem, take it to court with them. What are you telling me for?"

"'We can afford it, we can afford it.' And the second you actually have to pay, it hurts?"

"No money, but you've still got the nerve to bring people into my house? Get a clear picture of exactly who and what you are!"

"Stand up! Did I say you could sit? That sofa is worth more than your life!"

Under my tongue-lashing Grace stood, her face cycling through red and pale.

We were both young women. Who was really beneath whom?

The gap in money is a chasm, but few people will humiliate the poor so openly.

I hadn't wanted to. But Grace, dead broke and rattling with it, still insisting on acting a rung above me in my own house, turned my stomach.

I wouldn't have minded even meeting as equals. But she'd smashed my vase, I was about to fire Paulette, the very pillar holding her whole family up, and she was still swaggering?

Grace put on a look of contempt, even brushing at nonexistent dust off her backside.

"Sat on it? I've laid on it too! You think I want it? This thing's filthy. You're the only one who doesn't mind."

"I don't believe for a second you can get rid of my mother. I'm going to Neil!"

Even Paulette couldn't fix this. A nanny's daughter going to Neil, what the hell was that going to do?

But after Grace left, whether it was in my head or not, I suddenly caught a strange smell off the sofa.

That, on top of the way this mother and daughter had carried themselves, and the things they'd said, and a sense of foreboding started rising from somewhere deep in me.

Looking at the vase fragments scattered across the floor, I picked up my phone and made a call.

Before I could say a word, the voice on the other end came bright with excitement.

"Miss Gray, it's been so long since you called home."

But this was no time to reminisce. I spoke quickly.

"Dudley Armstrong, I have something I need you to handle for me..."

"Of course, Miss Gray. What do you need?"

I laid out the plan I'd been turning over in my head.

"Find some excuse to keep Neil James tied up, then bring some specialists to my house. Here's what I want..."

Dudley answered at once.

"Understood, Miss Gray. I'll bring the team over."

An hour later.

Dudley arrived at the villa with his people.

Every one of them was loaded down with bags and cases, and the moment they stepped inside they opened a black box the size of a desktop tower.

"Everyone in position. We cut all network access in ten minutes and bring the bridge system online..."

I couldn't follow the technical jargon, so I pulled Dudley aside.

"Dudley, did you bring the reagent and the UV light I asked for?"

The specialists he'd brought were already reinstalling and adjusting the house's surveillance system.

He had the equipment in his hands, and he asked me one more time.

"Miss Gray, are you sure you want to run this test? Neil James isn't some nobody from a small family. I think you already understand that."

"Once the results come back, good or bad, once trust breaks, there's no going back for you."

I gave a firm nod.

"I know, Dudley. I've already made up my mind. I'm the heiress of the Gray Group. What is Neil James, really?"

"I'm more and more certain that nanny and her daughter were only strutting around in front of me because Neil James let them."

"He uses my family's resources, plays the successful man in public, the rising star of business. But for me, the one who gave him all of it, he can't even be bothered with a detail like this."

"A man like that. I'm not just taking back everything the Gray Group gave him, I'm going to grind him into the dirt."

Dudley heard out my whole heated speech, said nothing more, and simply sprayed the mist in his hand across the sofa.

A few minutes later, he took out a lamp and shone it over the cushions.

At once, under the special light, the sofa lit up with large patches of fluorescence, uneven in depth, clearly not left on the same day.

Dudley switched off the light at once and turned to me.

"Miss Gray, your suspicions were right. Every one of these is semen fluorescing under the light."

Seeing those wide patches glow, I couldn't hold back my rage at Neil any longer.

Dudley, still holding the equipment, went on.

"Miss Gray, would you like me to check anywhere else?"

I shook my head and said, my face blank,

"No need. Just give me the final results."

Once I'd handed the whole thing over to Dudley, I turned and walked out of the villa Neil had bought specially for me, to celebrate our marriage.

It had cost over five million at the time, and it was still registered under my name.

But the thought of Neil's stains scattered all over that house made me sick.

After leaving the villa, I drove straight back to my own place.

As the eldest daughter of the Gray Group, I had five or six houses like it.

Cleaners came through them every day, so none of them were ever run-down or unlivable.

I lay on the bed, my head a mess of thoughts, until Dudley sent over the login for the villa's upgraded surveillance system.

I hadn't meant to look, but the pull of curiosity was too strong, and before I knew it I'd opened the feed.

Three in the afternoon. The villa's door swung open.

Paulette walked in with her little grandson.

Her expression was easy, not a trace of the awkwardness from our falling-out that morning, as natural as if she were coming home to her own house.

Coming in with her, both hands loaded down with shopping bags she could barely carry.

"See, I told you she wasn't here. What are you afraid of? Neil's obviously already reamed her out, and she knows she's in the wrong, so she doesn't dare come back."

Paulette cast a quick glance around, saw no one home, and struck the pose of a woman who'd won.

Grace cut her off.

"All right, Mom, let's talk about that vase already. I asked Neil this afternoon. It really is worth two million."

But Paulette rolled her eyes and let out something that stunned me.

"What are you afraid of? I gave him Toby. I gave the James family their heir. What's two million next to that?"