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  I’d had one job since we brought the girls home from the hospital and that was to grow them, a job I fell into easily, since I’d already been at it for thirty-seven weeks. In the beginning, it took everything I had and every last drop of me. It was when our daughters were eleven weeks old and I slept one night for five straight hours, waking with an extra ounce of brain function, that I almost asked Bradley what was going on in the real world. I’d come this close to asking him what was happening in the casino, at his desk, and with our coworkers. Before I did, though, I realized those questions would’ve led to this one—what was going to happen to us? To the Bellissimo employees? For that matter, to the Bellissimo? And with that in mind, I couldn’t do it. I told myself it was for his sake: I wouldn’t interrupt what little time he had with his daughters to discuss how bad things were on the other side of our front door. But the truth was I didn’t want to know, because if it weren’t for me there wouldn’t be anything bad to discuss. I wasn’t so off the rails and my rocker to think that Blitz taking down the Bellissimo was single-handedly my doing, but facts were facts: had we seen them coming, we could have been prepared. It was my job to see them coming, I didn’t, and there it was in black and white.

  So I didn’t ask.

  And neither did he.

  He didn’t ask who I’d talked to, where I’d been, or who I’d seen. He already knew. I’d talked to exactly no one, I’d been exactly nowhere, and I’d seen exactly no one.

  I turned the ringers off the phones the day we brought the girls home. Eight months later, I still hadn’t gotten around to turning them back on. So, for the most part, I didn’t talk to anyone except House or room service, and neither of them said a word worth repeating. I checked in with my parents via cell phone pictures of their granddaughters—no need to discuss—and the same with my best friend Fantasy. I’d text cute pictures. GIRLIES! She’d text back ADORBS!

  She didn’t want to talk either.

  It was no big deal.

  I didn’t see anyone with the exception of room service or the occasional nanny—let’s not go there—because having company was out of the question with House. On the rare occasions someone was in our home who wasn’t us, I passed out a cheat sheet of offensive words at the door. Try carrying on a conversation when the other person was doing nothing but running their finger up and down an alphabetical list of words they couldn’t say aloud. It wasn’t worth it. So with very few immediate family exceptions, I’d stopped seeing people too.

  It was fine.

  I didn’t go anywhere because as the girls grew, so did I, into a routine that worked, and I didn’t leave the house for fear of disrupting it. We lived in ten thousand square feet, for goodness’ sake. I could go nowhere and be everywhere without leaving home. We had a liana with a view of the Gulf, a balcony off the kitchen with a garden, and a terrace overlooking (Blitz) the city. I bundled up the girls, loaded them into their double stroller, and took them outside every day. Even foggy Wednesdays. Several days a week we went upstairs to the owner’s penthouse too, by way of the private elevator in our foyer. The Bellissimo owners, Richard and Bianca Sanders, had moved out, so the girls and I had thirty thousand square feet of change-in-scenery above us. I buckled them in their double jogger and ran five hard miles around the Sanders’ canvas-covered furniture four times in a week in the penthouse above us without ever walking out my front door. Even Dr. Calliope, the girls’ pediatrician, who wore scrubs with cute giraffes and baby pandas, was kind enough to come here for Bex and Quinn’s well-baby checkups instead of me having to go there. I had groceries, Huggies Baby Fresh, and Mr. Lau’s Dim Sum delivered, twenty-four-hour room service from the hotel, and XFINITY.

  Not that I watched television.

  I’d given up the internet too.

  I’d completely unplugged. And I hadn’t seen the other side of the front door since we brought the girls home. Which was exactly why Bradley was so dead set on us having a nanny.

  And exactly why I wasn’t.

  Bottom line—it was in everyone’s best interest I stay home. I had no intention of going back to work (I’d done enough damage) and I wasn’t about to leave my girls. I had yet to meet a nanny, out of thirty or so, I’d trust them with for ten minutes. I wasn’t going anywhere and they weren’t either, because for one, there were germs out there. And for another, an outing with eight-month-old twins would be harder than the 15 Puzzle. (I had two degrees from the University of Alabama at Birmingham: one in Criminal Justice and the other in Computer and Information Science. Somewhere in there I took a math class that was nothing but a semester of working the impossible 15 Puzzle, which, at the time, was the hardest thing I’d ever done. But that was before I thought about leaving home with two babies. Which would be infinitely harder.)

  And that was that.

  So tonight, like every night after tucking the babies in, we sat in semi-comfortable silence and let the last of Wednesday leave quietly. (Good riddance.) I had Bradley, he had me, and we had our girls. We took joy in our little family, which made up for all the rest. I felt certain we were getting closer to the next step, whatever that might be, and if we weren’t so ridiculously busy—him trying to keep the casino doors open and me snapping onesies all day—we’d probably be half crazy with the uncertainty of it all. Would we stay in Biloxi? Would he stay in the casino industry or go back to practicing law? Would I need to go back to work? These, and many more, were questions with no answers, so it did no good to discuss them. We focused on our daughters rather than the demise of the twenty-eight floors below us. We would ride out this Bellissimo storm and enjoy what time we had left until we handed the keys over to people who weren’t us. Then I’d go somewhere. I’d have to. Until then, I planned on staying put.

  I was fine.

  And I didn’t need a nanny.

  Four

  I was up once during the night for hungry girls, then right back to bed. When I woke again on Thursday morning to glorious spring sunshine—the fog had finally lifted—the video monitor on the nightstand showed both babies still asleep, which was the sweetest thing ever. Bradley was up and gone, probably for hours. I rolled over and placed my hand in the dent his blonde head left on the pillow and kept it there until I thought about coffee. My feet found fuzzy slippers. I just might get to drink a hot cup before my baby day started. I tiptoed to the kitchen, which was miles from the nursery, but my little princesses had Mommy Radar, so I proceeded with caution. House, they slept through. Me, they didn’t.

  I found a full pot of freshly brewed coffee, not hard to do in my kitchen, and a folded sheet of paper tucked under my cell phone. The phone, dark and cold, was wearing a Post-it note.

  Need your help. Would you mind checking your messages? There are several you haven’t returned and now my phone is ringing off the hook. I simply don’t have time to take the calls. Please and thank you. I love you.

  I’d checked my messages Sunday. Or Saturday. One or the other. Not long ago, for sure.

  I plugged in my phone, gave it a minute to resuscitate, and it gave me thirty-eight new text messages.

  Five were from my only sibling, my older sister, Meredith. Chitchat. One was asking if I had the recipe for Church Chicken, a dish our mother had served every Sunday of our lives. (No, I didn’t have the recipe. There wasn’t a recipe. It was baked chicken. Put the chicken in the oven and bake it.) Another had pictures of shoes attached—which should she wear with a black dress? The black ones or the black ones? I texted back a string of emoji baby bottles and a heart. Done.

  Eight were from my mother-in-law, Anne, in Texas. Did I get the package? (No.) (But Bradley probably did.) Did I see where the baby in Michigan choked on a grape and had to have emergency surgery? No doubt the child would be scarred for life. Please peel and cut the grapes. (Thank you, Anne. I’ll never eat a whole grape again.) Anne didn’t understand breastfeeding at all, was constantly sending food-themed me
ssages and encouraging me to “feed” the girls, and forever asking Bradley if the girls were starving to death. I texted her back. Hi, Anne! Kisses from your granddaughters! Then I attached every picture I’d taken of them since we went through this rigmarole the last time, a week ago. Or so. Clearly, the girls weren’t starving. Their baby rolls had baby rolls. That’d settle Anne down. For a few days.

  Two were from Bianca Sanders. The first: David. (It’s Davis.) My herbalist is in rehab.

  I was really sorry to hear that. Good luck to the herbalist.

  The second: David. (It’s Davis.) I fired my Tabata trainer. I need you to find me a new one.

  If I knew what Tabata was, maybe I could.

  I texted back: Bianca. It’s good to hear from you. I’ll see what I can do.

  Actually, I wouldn’t see what I could do. Not because I didn’t care about Bianca’s herbalist, but because I wouldn’t have time to care about her before I heard from Bianca again with a fresh set of even more pressing issues: her laundress’s assistant had mishandled her delicates, please find her a new one, or she needed an alternate source for Asian pears because she bit into a twenty-dollar pear that had a bruise.

  A text from my old boss No Hair. Hey, Kiddo.

  A text from my fifth-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Hitt. Davis, honey, all of us at Pine Apple Elementary are thinking about you. Principal Moore sends his best wishes too.

  A text from my father. Just checking in, Sweet Pea.

  The rest from my mother. And the contents of messages from my mother, who let Siri do her texting, were undecipherable. I’m cooking the desk ears. Your daddy bought a tub elevator for the January cinnamon birthday. Tomorrow I’m killing the emu for seashells.

  Nothing from Fantasy.

  I poured a cup of coffee and moved on with my life—the folded sheet of paper Bradley left under the phone. With another note.

  Good morning again, mother of my daughters. I didn’t want to wake you when I left. Could you do me a favor? This is a pink-slip list from Human Resources. You’ll find the names of employees who’ll be given their two-week notice with their paycheck on Friday. It would be great if you could go through and find a nanny. Don’t think of it as help for you, think of it as helping someone else. You’ll be saving them from the soup line, or worse, the competition. It will be good for you, good for the girls, and it’s time.

  Forever and ever—B.

  Again with the nanny.

  I knew about the layoffs, because Bradley’s home office, where he took evening and weekend work calls, was adjacent to our living room, which wasn’t far enough from my life sofa for me not to know. I couldn’t help but catch snippets of his side of conversations about operating expenses, net earnings, and layoffs. I lived here too. I knew. I didn’t want to know, but I did.

  The coffee was strong and the list was long. The Bellissimo had four thousand employees the first time we heard the word Blitz. By the time they opened their doors at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the work force here had dwindled to three thousand.

  The layoffs started the next week.

  It made me dizzy.

  My coffee and I had to sit down.

  Separated by departments, the first three names were from Accounting. Which made sense. Less money coming in, less to count. Next was Food Services, and there were so many names, more than thirty, I wondered if I’d be making my own strawberry milkshakes starting today. Human Resources was letting employees go from Horticulture, Housekeeping, and the Hotel Liaison office of three was closing. Next was Casino Services, where I came across the first names I recognized. Two casino hosts, both of whom I knew for a fact had been here since the doors opened in 1995, were losing their jobs, along with the four specialty casino hosts—wedding, reunion, holiday, and slot tournament—one of whom I knew. Last on the list was a note to the flight crews, starting with the fleet captain, Denver J. Sandoval, reminding them to keep their bags packed, because when the Bellissimo fleet sold, they were gone. And with that, I’d reached the end of the layoff list for the week. In six months, we’d gone from four thousand employees to twenty-seven hundred, twenty-six fifty with this round of cuts, and it just wouldn’t stop.

  The bottom half of the page listed the names of employees who had either turned in their notices or were being written off as MIA. I could tell them exactly where to find the ones who’d left quietly at the end of their shifts without bothering to say goodbye—right across the Bay at Blitz—and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it. I didn’t know the details, because it had gone down when the girls were tiny newborns and I was (breastfeeding) otherwise occupied, but the first big no-compete challenge happened when our casino manager, Bryant Ramsey, traded his old Bellissimo office for a new one at Blitz. The Bellissimo legal team went after Ramsey with everything they had and lost, the judge ruling, “The geographic scope of the non-compete didn’t specify D’Iberville.” Clearly, since D’Iberville was only three miles away, the court intended to take their gambling dollars to Blitz too. After the loss, the decision was made by my husband to steer Bellissimo energies and resources in the direction of keeping the staff we still had employed as long as possible rather than fight the no-win non-competes. Because after losing the first and biggest fight to the casino manager, there’d be no winning against the pastry chef or housekeeping supervisor, not to mention three of our four attorneys now worked for them. There’d been a mass exodus from this casino to that, with no end in sight. One day I picked up the house phone and dialed Blitz. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask for Fantasy Erb, just to see, when the operator answered with, “Thank you for calling the Bellissimo Resort and Casino. How may I direct your call?” She caught herself. “Blitz! Blitz! Thank you for calling the Blitz!”

  I hung up.

  The first name on the bottom half caught my eye. Robin Sandoval, the Bellissimo Gallery’s curator, had quit. Abruptly. She was already gone. Her notice and her last day at work were the same, four days ago, Monday. It wasn’t so surprising that the gallery curator would leave, seeing as how the gallery contents were on the chopping block, but what I did find curious was that she’d leave now, and so suddenly, because her husband’s name was on the top half of the page. Captain Denver J. Sandoval, the lead pilot. Wouldn’t most couples ride it out? Bank the his-and-hers payroll for as long as possible? She’d walked away from a six-figure salary for doing next to nothing. If the hotel and casino were at thirty-two percent capacity—something I’d seen buzz across Bradley’s phone last weekend—which was absolute ghost town in casino world, the gallery had to be at zero percent. Did she find another job? Unlikely. Curator jobs in lower Mississippi were hard to find. And by hard to find I meant they didn’t exist.

  I found it odd.

  I found them odd.

  Which was exactly what I told Bradley when we met the Sandovals. She was the very definition of a trophy wife—magazine-cover pretty, twenty years younger, and a foot taller than her pilot husband. You’d think that would make for a happy pilot husband, but everything about him said mad. As in angry. With her, the rest of the human race, and with life in general. We were at the grand opening of the Bellissimo Gallery with art aficionados from around the globe. The gallery was packed, the casino booming, and I was trying to not have the babies on the floor. Other than that, we didn’t have a care in the world. Back then it was Blitz schmitz.

  “Why would she marry him?” I asked my husband.

  We were stuffed in a corner beside an Impressionist-looking oil painting the size of a small greeting card with the price tag of a large private island. I was sitting in a black velvet Queen Anne chair sipping sparkling cranberry juice from a champagne flute and watching the power couple. Bradley was standing beside me with a Scotch on the rocks watching me watch them. The wife kept looking over her shoulder to find her husband across the room shrewdly directing her, discreetly signaling her to move l
eft. She’d move left, to the lady with no lips in a purple evening gown, only for him to point her lefter, to the man with the Abraham Lincoln beard in a white tuxedo.

  “Maybe because she loves him?”

  Robin Sandoval’s husband didn’t look the least bit loveable to me. He looked mean.

  “They don’t go together,” I said.

  “Obviously, they do.”

  We watched him extract her from one conversation and insert her into another with three taps to his nose, two coughs, and one small nod.

  “I don’t think I like them, Bradley.”

  “You don’t even know them, Davis. You don’t like them because Richard didn’t ask you to vet them, and because you can’t walk.”

  The first part was true; Mr. Sanders hired the Sandovals the fast and loose way. He didn’t run it by a soul, much less this soul.

  The second part was true too; I couldn’t walk.

  I hadn’t seen the Sandovals, thought about them, or heard their names again until they showed up on Human Resource’s list that quiet Thursday morning. And I forgot all about them again as I skimmed through the next twenty names and reached the end. Handwritten at the bottom in my husband’s small block lettering, barely distinguishable from the printed names above, was the last name I thought I’d ever see on the quit list. Just the one name: Baylor. I stared at it until the letters blurred. Baylor was all that was left of my team. I’d given up my job as an undercover casino Super Secret Spy before the girls were born, so I was, well, here. Richard and Bianca Sanders were gone. No Hair was gone. Fantasy was gone. And now Baylor was leaving? I realized then, without having completely formed the thought before, the only comfort I had was Baylor. Knowing that when Bradley walked out our door to the devastation on the other side he still had Baylor, Baylor still had him, and the two of them were all that was left between life as we knew it and lights out. Baylor couldn’t leave. He just couldn’t. It was the last straw. And probably exactly why Bradley tucked the list under my phone. It had nothing to do with hiring a nanny. He was trying to tell me, without telling me, it was almost over. That his efforts to save the Bellissimo had failed and our leaving was imminent.