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Robby had a theory, after almost four months in Pittsburgh: there wasn't a single babysitting agency in the city that didn't have some kind of note filed next to the name Robinavitch. Something like handle with care, or only if desperate.
He couldn't really blame them.
Deborah, the first one, lasted three hours, right after Florence and Oliver explained to her, dead serious, that the family had a pact of silence about what happened to the last nanny.
Priya, the second, went down when Oliver talked her into a scientific experiment that just meant lying perfectly still on the couch for exactly fifteen minutes. She quit that same night over text, photo of the notebook included, the last line of which read, word for word, subject not reliable.
Susan, the fifth, was terrified of anything with four legs and fur, and held out exactly until Hazel introduced her to Pickles so they could be friends. According to witnesses, the scream carried all the way up to 5B.
Nannies six, seven, and nine all fell to Leon, who considered any raised surface a legitimate launch pad and met every attempt at discipline with the same didn't hurt.
Number eight never even made it inside. She quit the second she saw the apartment from the doorway.
Florence, meanwhile, didn't sabotage anything on purpose. She just existed with so much indifference and hostility that most nannies felt like they were trespassing on enemy territory every time she so much as looked at them. She didn't lie, didn't manipulate, didn't break anything. She just watched, and let the silence do the rest of the work.
Robby had honestly lost count of exactly how many had come through the apartment. He knew it was a two-digit number in barely four months, and he knew every new hire came with a real chance of ending in a mid-afternoon text that said I'm sorry, this isn't what I expected. I won't be coming back.
Like that Thursday afternoon.
He was in a particularly boring admin meeting about triage protocols when his phone buzzed on the table.
Friend Dennis
ur kids are at my apartment. Again.
Robby
what happened?
Friend Dennis
no clue, I'm not their nanny, but from what I gather, they got left alone after the woman saw Flo.
Robby
are they all ok?
Friend Dennis
theyve been standing in my living room for ten minutes, so I assume so.
according to Hazel, the woman left crying down the hallway.
Im not going to ask any more questions about that.
can you come get them?? I have a shift in two hours.
could ask Paula to watch them, but she's trying to study. I can't ask a future lawyer to handle four wild kids and her exams at the same time.
Robby
im coming, 40 min. im really sorry about this.
Robby was surprised by the reply that came back. He'd braced for a five-hundred-word lecture, but instead his neighbor changed the subject completely.
Friend Dennis
Are any of them allergic to peanuts?
Robby
they eat literally anything. leo's even tried a cockroach
Friend Dennis
not surprised.
im going to make them PB&J sandwiches, is that okay?
Robby
more than ok
i owe u one
Friend Dennis
you already owe me like five.
this is the third time this month, Robby.
Robby stared at that message longer than he needed to. Dennis had a point. As usual. He put the phone away without so much as a smile, doing frantic mental math on how much of the meeting he still had to sit through before he could slip out without it looking too rude.
And still, somewhere in the back of his head, he couldn't help thinking that no matter how much Dennis complained in every single text, the door to 4C always opened anyway. His gay best friend could fake all the irritation in the world, but he had never once left the kids standing in the hallway, not a single time.
Forty minutes later he found Dennis cleaning up the mess his kids had made, while Hazel narrated the whole saga of the lady who'd bolted after Oliver told her there was a ghost named Florence living in the apartment, to a thoroughly delighted Amelia.
"There he is," Dennis announced, without looking up. "The man responsible."
"I come in peace." Robby found Leo surrounded by the pieces of a remote control that had clearly not survived. "Was that my TV remote?"
"Not anymore." Said Oliver.
Robby dropped onto the couch. "I'm going to need the number for a different agency."
"I'm going to need you to consider, at some point in your life, hiring someone who doesn't bolt inside of a month."
"It's not like I enjoy this," Robby grumbled, gathering up the remote's pieces despite Oliver's protests, since it had, of course, been his idea to take the thing apart for one of his experiments.
"Maybe you need, like, some kind of ex-military type or something." Dennis looked at him for a second, with an expression that was hard to read. Then he rolled his eyes and kept going. "Paula has an aunt. I can try to get in touch with her if you want."
"Please." Robby sounded more desperate than he'd have liked to admit. "I'm not even asking for someone to do laundry, cook, or clean. Honestly, I don't care about any of that. I just need someone who can survive my kids."
That's how, two days later, Sylvia walked into 4AB for the first time. Sixty years old, with the energy of someone half her age, and a talent in the kitchen that made itself known within fifteen minutes of her walking through the door. She was, in more ways than one, the sixty-something female version of Robby; the same total disregard for the standard parenting manual, paired with an authority he honestly spent half his life trying to muster.
She let Leon climb up on the kitchen table and jump off it, no problem, one hand hovering close enough to catch him if he actually needed it, never once telling him to get down. She seemed to understand, in a way none of the others had, that some things a kid like Leo just needed to get out of his system, and that fighting him on it only made him climb higher.
Pickles, on the other hand, got nothing but disdain from her, at least out loud. She called him el ratón under her breath every time he trotted across the kitchen, like his existence personally offended her. And yet, without fail, she was the only one in the house who bothered to cook him little bits of meat on the side, just for him, muttering the whole time about how this little devil of a rat was going to be the death of her.
With Oliver, she played it smarter than any of the others had. Instead of banning the experiments, she allowed them, as long as they happened under her supervision. One afternoon she convinced him they were about to create an ancient, secret formula, one nobody else in the building knew about, mixing together different kinds of detergent in a bucket with total seriousness while Oliver wrote down proportions in his notebook with the same scientific fervor he brought to everything else. The ancient formula turned out to just be the way Sylvia had been getting whites spotless for the last forty years. Oliver, of course, never found out, and walked away from that afternoon convinced he'd witnessed a revolutionary discovery, while every light-colored piece of laundry in the house came out of the washer whiter and better-smelling than Robby had ever seen it.
"Sylvia, I think I'm going to love you for the rest of my life."
"Save that for when you pay me the first full paycheck."
What really threw Robby off, though, was coming home one Saturday at eight in the morning after a night shift and finding the apartment unrecognizable: dishes washed, the mountain of laundry gone, toys put away, and the kids, Florence included, having breakfast at the kitchen island.
"What did you do to my apartment?"
"I cleaned it. What did you want, for it to sit like a pigsty all day?"
No nanny before her had ever cleaned anything. Most of them couldn't even get the kids dressed before running out the door.
"That's because you let the kids run the show." Sylvia folded a towel without breaking rhythm. "In this house, I run the show. The kids play, eat, bathe, and the apartment ends up decent while we're at it. It's not that hard, Miguelito."
Robby didn't even flinch at the way his new nanny addressed him. It sounded sweet, and that was enough for him. Months later he'd find out Miguelito was basically a Spanish translation of Little Michael, or some other affectionate spin on his name.
"The thing is, you white folks don't know how to do anything."
She said this on another day, right after Robby marveled at the sheer amount of food from her home country Sylvia could produce out of nowhere. Then she launched into a long story, in Spanish, about her own five kids, plus three more from a sister, including her niece Paula, plus two from a neighbor who'd since passed, all of them raised at the same time, no help, no nanny, and not one of them ending up half as wild as the Robinavitches. Robby didn't understand half of it, and didn't try particularly hard to.
One night, right at seven o'clock, he stopped dead in the doorway for a full second, not entirely sure he'd walked into the right apartment. All four of them were on the couch, Florence included, bathed, in pajamas, mugs of hot milk in hand, glued to a telenovela blasting at full volume.
"She's about to confess ¡Qué descarada!" Hazel burst out suddenly, with total conviction, the kind that made it obvious she'd said that exact line hundreds of times before.
"Since when do you speak Spanish?" asked Robby, thoroughly stunned, hanging his jacket by the door.
"Shh," Hazel hushed him, without taking her eyes off the screen. "I don't speak Spanish. I just know that one part 'cause Sylvia says it every day." The little girl shrugged and explained quickly. "No idea what it means, but it sounds cool when she gets mad at the mean lady on TV."
"Wait, isn't he José Mauricio's brother?" Oliver asked, genuinely confused, ignoring everything his sister had just said. Robby was pretty sure his son hadn't even noticed he'd walked in.
"No, stupid, José Mauricio is Manuel Lorenzo's brother," Florence corrected, eyes still on the screen, with the absolute certainty of someone who'd been following the plot religiously for over a month.
"And Manuel Lorenzo doesn't know María del Rosario is Ana Daniela's mom," Sylvia chimed in, with no real judgment. "¡Ay Jesús! Si Manolito se entera le dará un infarto."
Leo, wedged between Sylvia and the arm of the couch, was already losing the fight against sleep, his mug tipping dangerously between his hands.
"What happen?" he mumbled, cracking one eye open when the dramatic music swelled.
"Nothing, m'ijo, sleep," Sylvia said, sliding the mug out of his hands in one automatic motion before it could tip over onto the couch.
"Did Spiderman win?"
"Spiderman won," she confirmed, with absolutely no connection to whatever was actually happening on screen.
Leo smiled and dropped off to sleep against her side. Robby, from the single armchair, kept watching the whole scene a moment longer than he needed to. His four kids, each impossible in their own way, all calm on the same couch for the first time in months. And he thought, not without some surprise, that maybe he didn't need to go looking for another nanny after all.
Weeks later, Sylvia was getting ready to head out after a full day with the kids. She was running down everything missing from the pantry and the cleaning supplies so Robby could go shopping, on top of already writing it all on the little whiteboard on the fridge.
Then, like she'd suddenly run out of things to talk about, she remembered something.
"I ran into the neighbor across the hall today. Such a handsome young man. Polite. Well-mannered."
"Dennis?" Robby frowned, genuinely thrown. "Are we talking about the same Dennis? Dark blond, blue eyes, looks like he wants to kill you on sight?"
"He's always a sweetheart with me," Sylvia insisted. "Though I did notice he seemed off. Stressed."
"Stressed about what?" Robby asked, halfway through the delicious empanada Sylvia had left in a tupperware, one he hadn't taken long to track down.
"Because his ex-husband is flying in from LA next month."
"His ex-husband?" he repeated, one eyebrow raised, not quite managing to hide it.
Sylvia looked at him, weighing whether the story was worth telling, and finally sat down in a kitchen chair with a long sigh. "Ay, these legs aren't what they used to be."
Robby, almost without thinking, was already filling the kettle. "Tea?"
"Two sugars, please," she asked politely, and kept going. "This Dean guy. Forty-five, according to what Paulita told me."
"So he's fifteen years older than Dennis," Robby did the math out loud, unable to stop himself.
"Only fifteen? I would've guessed he was younger. That man's got a baby face, like little baby Jesus." A pretty fitting comparison, in Robby's opinion. Fuck, no, he had not just thought that.
"So what's wrong with this Dean guy?" Robby tried to steer Sylvia back to the part of the story that actually seemed interesting. Not that he was interested, of course not. There was no way he, Michael Robinavitch, cared at all about his neighbor's personal life.
"He's a jerk," she declared, with zero hesitation. "Barely ever shows up. The girl waits for him for weeks and the man cancels over nothing."
"That's awful," Robby said, with more edge than he'd meant to put into it.
"That's what I told him," Sylvia took another sip of her tea, clearly warming up to the topic now. "But you know, I told him he should relax, maybe focus on himself, find someone to, you know, pass the time with."
"And?" Robby's voice came out tighter than he'd have liked.
"And Dennis told me he's already seeing someone."
"Seriously?" Robby leaned forward slightly, with more urgency than he'd have liked to admit.
"Yes, some guy named Brendon."
Robby froze halfway through pouring the tea. "Brendon? Brendon who?"
"I don't know his last name. All I know is they work together, at the hospital." She said, shrugging. Robby was honestly surprised Sylvia hadn't dug for more.
Robby set the kettle down harder than necessary. "That's Brendon Park. Ortho. He's unbearable, Sylvia. Insufferable. We once argued for forty minutes about who had priority in the OR and he ended up doing whatever he wanted anyway."
"Well, seems like Dennis doesn't find him so insufferable." Sylvia took another sip, visibly enjoying the effect her words were having. "Though, according to Paulita, it doesn't seem to be going too well for him. She says Dennis gets grumpy every time the guy comes up."
Robby went quiet for a moment, processing that with an intensity that probably said more than he'd have liked it to. Honestly, though, he wasn't entirely sure how to explain what he was feeling either.
"I didn't know any of this," he finally said, trying to sound a lot more indifferent than he actually was.
"Of course you didn't know." Sylvia looked at him with a smile she didn't bother hiding. "You're so busy with your own four you don't even notice what's happening right across the hall. But I notice. Nothing gets past me."
"And why exactly are you telling me all this?" Robby asked, in a belated attempt to recover some composure.
Sylvia looked at him, eyebrow raised, clearly enjoying herself. "And why does it interest you so much, Miguelito?"
"No reason," Robby answered, way too fast. "Just curious. We're neighbors."
"Mmhm." Sylvia looked thoroughly unconvinced, though she didn't push the point either, filing that small victory away with the same calm she filed away everything else. "I should get going."
"Let me call you a Lyft." He replied immediately, already pulling out his phone to enter his nanny's address.
Sylvia, despite Robby's constant insistence, washed the mugs while her Lyft was on its way, singing a song in Spanish he'd never once heard in his life, but that somehow sounded vaguely familiar. Then he remembered washing Hazel's hair himself one day, his daughter singing along with total ease. It had to be from the playlist Sylvia played every single day.
"It's here," Robby said, as she dried her hands with a kitchen towel. "What would I do without you, Sylvita?"
Yeah. He was picking up Spanish nicknames now.
"Hire a new nanny every two weeks, I imagine. And keep having no idea what's going on around you. See you tomorrow, Miguelito."
The door closed behind her. Robby stood alone in the kitchen with a considerable amount of new information spinning around in his head.
Of course, the next day Sylvia came back. The day after that, too. And every day after that, all the same.
A year and a half later, she was the one who greeted them when Dennis and Robby walked through the door of 4AB with Mason Whitaker-Robinavitch in their arms, while five siblings pushed and shoved each other to be the first to meet the newest member of the family