Page 12 of Boss of the Year

“Stella?” he had asked when we were two hours out of Paris.

I’d shaken my head and taken a sip of club soda. He’d given up pretending to know who I was about forty minutes into the flight.

“Lindsay?”

Another shake.

“Give me a hint, honey,” he had begged with a hand on my shoulder. “Just a little one.”

I’d stared at the hand, feeling the heat rising up my neck and into my cheeks. “You once claimed my chicken soup could cure anything.”

An eleven-shaped mark had appeared in the center of Daniel’s perfect brow. “Your chicken soup…oh, right…Margot?”

I ignored the disappointment lodging in my stomach like brick. He didn’t even remember the day that had changed my entire life.

I was seventeen and had been working as a maid on the Lyons estate for two years. One day, I went in to clean Daniel’s room, thinking he was out with friends, and had found him burrowed under his comforter with a terrible cold.

Seeing Daniel with a fever made him more…human. I was able to talk to him for the first time ever. Ask him if he needed anything. Offer help.

As I gathered his laundry, I mentioned that my family made the best chicken pastina soup in the world. Nonna said it could cure any illness. After blowing his nose longer than any human had in history, Daniel had said he would kill for a bowl.

I’d gone straight to the kitchen and made him my nonna’s recipe.

One bowl of soup changed everything for me. Daniel had eaten all of it, the first thing he’d consumed in days. He told me he was pretty sure it saved his life, and shortly after that, I was promoted to assistant cook.

But he didn’t remember a thing.

My heart sped up when Bogdan turned onto the familiar Premium Point drive. How many times had I made this exact trip in the mornings before leaving for Paris?

Carlos, the Lyonses’ groundskeeper, made morning and evening runs to the New Rochelle train station for staff members who didn’t live on site. For years, I’d taken the New Haven line from Fordham every afternoon after my classes were finished, then every morning and evening for another six years after I finished high school. I’d passed these houses too many times to count. Knew every one of the mansions by heart. Every number, every rose bush.

“That way.” I pointed to the left when the street forked onto the peninsula.

Bogdan grunted, which was the most conversation he’d offer the whole drive, then pulled up to the gate, where I rolled down the window.

Frank, the kindly gatehouse guard, brightened when he spotted me. “Hey, look who it is! Welcome back, Marie!”

I smiled and waved as we drove on.

What did it say that a security guard, with whom I’d barely spoken, remembered my name in a blink, but Daniel hadn’t after nine hours?

Nothing, I told myself.It just means you’ve changed.

It means he wasn’t interested before.

And now he is.

Fear bubbled in my chest. New Marie was doing all right, but the past was waving at me as the gates opened and we drove onto Prideview Park.

The estate was aptly named. The Lyons family owned several acres in an area where even the richest families had one at most. Their land took up the far end of the peninsula that jutted out onto the Long Island Sound. On lunch breaks during the summer, one of my favorite things to do was watch the sailing classes that passed in front of the house, the cadre of tiny white books flying across the water in a delicate, laughing flock.

Bogdan steered the van through the orchard where I’d spent hours picking fruit for Daniel’s family and the rest of the staff. The arborist had given me my own clippers for my eighteenth birthday.

We passed another staff house where the groundkeepers lived, then the tennis courts, the pool, and the two guest cottages that had hosted multiple royals. Finally, the minivan rounded the circular driveway in front of the Tudor-style mansion built sometime in the early twenties, when the family had originally commissioned a country escape from their Gilded Age home in the city.

For almost a hundred and fifty years, the Lyonses had been one of New York’s wealthiest denizens—and had become wealthier still under the guidance of Lucas, the elder son.

Everything here had history. Everything here was old.