Nobody lasted in the Whitaker mansion.
For fourteen days, the estate overlooking the sunlit hills of San Diego became a place every nanny agency whispered about but no longer wanted to touch. The home itself looked like a dream from the outside, all glass walls, limestone steps, sculpted hedges, and fountains that caught the afternoon light like diamonds.
Inside, it had become something else.
Thirty-seven caregivers had walked through the front door. Thirty-seven had left before the end of the second week. Some resigned politely with shaking voices. Some stormed out cursing under their breath. Some cried in their cars for twenty minutes before they could drive away.
The thirty-seventh did not even make it to her car.
She ran down the long driveway barefoot, one shoe in her hand, her uniform torn at the sleeve and streaked with green paint from shoulder to hip. Her hair had come loose from its neat bun, and her face was white with panic.
“This house is cursed!” she screamed at the security guard by the gate. “Tell Mr. Whitaker to hire a priest, not another nanny!”
The guard, who had seen more strange things in two weeks than in his previous five years on the job, did not try to stop her. He simply pressed the button to open the gates and watched her disappear into the waiting taxi.
From the third-floor office, Jonathan Whitaker watched the taxi wind down the private road until it vanished between eucalyptus trees.
He did not move for a long time.
At thirty-six, Jonathan was the kind of man business magazines loved to put on covers. He had built a billion-dollar technology company from a rented apartment, turned down offers most people would have accepted without breathing, and learned to carry pressure like a tailored suit.
People called him disciplined.
Visionary.
Unshakable.
But none of those words meant anything when he stood alone in a mansion with six grieving daughters who had decided every adult who entered their home was an enemy.
Behind him, on the edge of his desk, stood a silver-framed photograph.
Maribel.
His wife was smiling in the picture, her hair lifted by ocean wind, her arms wrapped around their girls as if she could hold the entire world together by force of love. Elena was eight in the photograph, Camila six, Sofia five, Isabel four, Lucia two, and Mia still round-cheeked and unsteady on her feet.
Jonathan picked up the frame.
The glass was smudged from being touched too often. He never cleaned it. Cleaning it felt like admitting she was gone, and some part of him still refused to do that.
“Thirty-seven,” he whispered.
His assistant’s voice came through the speakerphone, careful and strained.
“Sir, I spoke with the last two agencies. They are declining further placements. One of them used the word blacklist.”
Jonathan closed his eyes.
“They blacklisted my children?”
“They blacklisted the address,” she said gently. “But yes.”
Down in the front garden, a bicycle lay half-submerged in the fountain. Someone had ripped marigolds from the soil and arranged them in a crooked circle around a headless doll. A line of purple handprints climbed one of the white exterior walls.
Jonathan had stopped asking who had done what. The answer was always the same.
All of them.
“There
