I’d known him for a long time but he didn’t recognize me and I welcomed that. I was interviewing for a position as a nanny and housekeeper to help his wife care for his three minions. She’d been a bit overwhelmed since the youngest was born almost a year ago, it had been a difficult birth. It helped that he never really knew my real name, he knew me as Remy. We’d met just before he got married to his wife, a chat room I made nightly called Insanity. I was going through a bad breakup and welcomed people struggling with life in general.

Insanity was a place of shenanigans and tomfoolery where an average night might see us discussing the ramifications of overthrowing Hell (there were none, we would run it in a way that would make the devil cry) or discussing our most secret desires. (Mine was to fuck two guys at the same time, he never really confessed his, the only one he would offer was complete the sexual submission of a pretty girl.) It was fun, lighthearted, ribbing, goading, a much needed escape from reality from everyone that participated regularly.

I was 19 and had a school-girl crush on an older guy that was well on his way to getting his life together. (He was engaged, I knew he was engaged, so it remained an unannounced crush that just tore apart my heart a little more each time he talked about the upcoming wedding.) We stayed friends and we talked nearly every day for the first few years we knew each other. After a while he told me he had to cut down on talking to me because he found it easier to confide in me than his wife and that wasn’t right. I agreed, so nearly daily talking turned into maybe weekly conversation then the first k** was born and it was almost monthly conversations.

It went on like that until we could easily go a year between chats, though I would often search him out on social media to see what was going on in his life as I harbored that crush well into my early 20s. I saw his posts about the two new k**s long before he ever reached out and actually told me about them. Then I saw him post a thing on social media about looking for a live-in nanny. It had been over a year since we last talked and he still didn’t know my name, but once upon a time we’d talked on the phone, so I wasn’t sure if I could keep the ruse of not knowing him up for very long. I was 25 and had just completed my Master’s in Education and Early c***dhood Development. I was already a qualified social worker, but I was working my way up to being able to specialize in research of how soon into life signs of mental illnesses could be accurately established.

He lived near the college program I was going to be pursuing and used that in my cover letter as a reason for pursuing a nanny position when I was qualified for a better and higher paying job. Basically, the ability to study and commute to and from my courses without the upkeep/expense of my own apartment was appealing to me.