Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 43

At first, I told myself I was seeing things. I saw Shannon whispering something to Nanny Aimee in the living room, the two of them exchanging a conspiratorial look, and I said to myself: It’s nothing. I watched her go on long walks with Clementine through the fields and the woods on her weekly day off, and I thought, How nice! I clocked her having lunch alone with Caleb on the front porch—first every once in a while, and soon practically daily—and I thought, Don’t think about it. I saw the way Caleb looked at her when she rolled her eyes and laughed at some dumb thing he said, and I noticed how their fingers sometimes touched when they had lunch, and then I looked the other way.

I ignored all this and more because I needed to, because I was four months pregnant with my sixth child and gaining thirty thousand followers a week; because Shannon was less of an employee, if I was honest, and more like my own two hands; because she could lock me out of my own account if she wanted to; because of the most basic rule of social media, as grounding and essential as the laws of gravity: you cannot fall backward in terms of quality.

For all those reasons and more, it was not a consideration I felt particularly eager to interrogate: why Shannon would suddenly be working so hard to seduce everyone on the ranch but me.

It went like this for months. Clementine started talking about oceans and cities. She wanted to go to California. She wanted to see the Pacific. As a form of compromise, I started taking her to Target once a month. Then the nannies came to me one day and asked for a raise, and even though I wanted to slap the lip gloss off their ungrateful little faces, I said yes immediately. All you had to do was ask!

And then one day, Caleb walked up to me and said, “Do we really need two nannies?” and I knew another woman had taken full control of Yesteryear Ranch.

Still— mercy —I didn’t let her go. And then Caleb walked into our bedroom late one night after the final milking of the day ( ha, I would think later: a milking indeed) and said, “We need to talk.”