The next morning, Steven suffered through his undergrad fiction workshop with a hangover; three drinks had, sometime in the last few years, become a daylong punishment. The projection screen, synced to his laptop, displayed the first page of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

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“Let’s go through all the significant details in the first paragraph,” he said, pacing the room like a lawyer before a jury in hopes of reviving his energy. “Who wants to start?”

No one volunteered.

“Well, what do you make of the grandmother’s ‘thin hip’ and her ‘rattling the newspaper’ in the same sentence?”

Again, nothing but the clank of the old radiators. Before he could make another plea, one of his students raised his hand. He had a hard time distinguishing between the slouchy, mumbly boys, the quality of whose fiction—and underclassmen males had never been the most sensitive interpreters of the world to begin with—deteriorated with every minute of porn they watched, reactionary podcast they listened to, and ultraviolent video game they played (pot, kettle).

“Um, Professor Hammer?” the boy said. “You’re getting a notification?”

In his groggy haze, he’d neglected to disable notifications, and across the room a text popped up on the projection screen from Lucy Myers: “I forwarded kids camp forms to you. Fill out please. I paid tuition. Also sent you stipend.”

He walked to the laptop as fast as he could without making it obvious he was hurrying. But the room was lousy with chairs, and before he could get there another alert arrived: a bank notice about money sent to him by Lucy Myers, specifying the amount and labeling the transaction stipend.

The class had been quiet after the camp text, but now there was at least one snort.

In his haste to clear the texts, he accidentally clicked on the second one. It opened every previous communication from the financial institution, identical monthly messages—twelve of them—all confirming the same transfer, all tagged stipend.

Just over a year ago, he’d confided to Lucy that he was low on money. She asked if he could get teaching work. He’d already tried rustling up employment; his old grad school friend, now the department head at this university, had only a single peanuts-paying class he could give him, with the hope a tenure-track role might open in the next year or two.

In the meantime, Steven had proposed that he become the full-time caretaker of the children, and the money they saved by forgoing a nanny could be allocated to him.

“I’d rather you finish your novel and sell it,” Lucy said.

He wondered if her motive wasn’t purely financial—or even because, in her corporate milieu, it was infra dig for a man to sideline his career to tend to his brood—so much as that she was threatened by the prospect of his growing closer yet to the kids. Though assisted by Constanza, he’d changed exponentially more diapers than Lucy ever had, fixed more snacks, applied more Band-Aids; those small daily acts of service had bonded him to Sophie and Caleb in ways their mother, who parachuted in once in a while, never could.

“In that case,” he said, “so I can focus on it, how would you feel about giving me a . . . sort of fellowship stipend?”

Unlike his brother, he wasn’t too proud to accept help. He could sense her dismay—not in parting with the money, which she could easily afford, but at what it said about his diminishing prospects. She never lorded her breadwinner status over him, which encompassed everything in their lives: the titanic mortgage and maintenance on their condo, the private school tuitions, the live-in nanny. But she didn’t have to. Even unspoken, it was the arbiter of all family decisions, and should they enter this new understanding, it would now resurface not only with every check placed before Steven that he—after the waiter left—then slid over to his wife, but each shirt, cocktail, and hardcover he independently purchased for which she’d ultimately foot the bill.

Nevertheless, she’d consented. And ever since, on the first of every month, she had transferred from her bank account to his a generous “stipend.” She didn’t automate the transaction; he wondered if that was to ensure they both got a monthly reminder of their lopsided arrangement, one that dressed itself in a more dignified noun than allowance.

Only now his entire class was reviewing their mortifying ledger, and it wasn’t hard to figure out what their code word really meant. He finally cleared away the messages and disabled further notifications.

“‘Thin hip’ and ‘rattling’ evoke a skeleton, and ‘rattling’ also suggests a rattlesnake,” he said, pretending none of them had seen his household finances—and marriage—laid bare. “It all foreshadows her death.”

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From The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne. Copyright © 2026 by Teddy Wayne. Reprinted here with permission from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers