Chapter 2
He didn't move away from the French doors. He lifted his chin toward the corner of the nursery ceiling, above the white trim where the wall met the crown molding.
I followed his eyes and saw it then, a small black dome I had passed a dozen times and told myself was a smoke detector.
"Up there," he said. His voice was low and controlled now, the shock gone flat. "Nursery cam. Motion triggered. Cloud backup. It caught every night you've been out there, Hulda."
I kept both hands on the bowl. The cool night air coming through the twisted iron bars raised goosebumps on my wrists. Rosaline's pink rabbit sat on the sill between us, one ear flopped over the wood.
Inside, Camille tugged at my sleeve through the bars, her light blue pajamas bunching at her elbow. I didn't let go of the bowl.
He stepped closer to the window but didn't open it. He held his phone out, screen dark. "You want to say why you're feeding my children? Because someone inside isn't. That's what you said. Say it again for the camera."
That was exactly what I'd said a minute earlier, and hearing him repeat it back word for word made my stomach drop. He wasn't guessing. He'd heard me through the glass, or through the camera's mic.
"Show me," I said. My voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to. "If it's recording, show me."
He tapped his phone. The screen lit his face from below. He turned it so I could see through the bars.
The image was the nursery, from above. Wide angle, slightly fisheye. Time-stamped in the corner: 02:14 AM, two nights ago. I saw myself in my olive coat, the same bowl, passing it through the same bars. Rosaline in her pink pajamas reaching with both hands. Camille beside her. No audio, just movement. He swiped. Another clip. 01:47 AM, three nights before that. Same.
"Four nights this week," he said. "You want to explain that to a judge, or you want to explain it to me right here?"
I felt the dent in the bowl under my thumb, the light-colored enamel chipped at the edge where I'd dropped it on my apartment sink.
"You want to know why," I said. I pulled the bowl back an inch, just enough that Camille's fingers slipped off the rim. "Come look at your kitchen. Then tell me what the camera caught."
He stared at me for a long beat. Then he unlocked the side door, the one that led from the nursery wing into the service hall. He didn't open the window. He expected me to walk around.
I left the bowl on the outside sill for a second and walked along the dark blue exterior, my shoes crunching on the frosted grass, to where he held the door open six inches, his body blocking most of it.
I hadn't been inside that house in three weeks, not since I'd been told my help wasn't needed anymore. The warmth hit me immediately, the tungsten light too bright after the night outside.
He led me down the short hall to the nursery kitchenette, the small one they used for bottles and snacks. He flipped the light. The counters were clean. The mini fridge hummed.
"Show me empty," he said, almost daring me.
I opened the fridge. There was a row of whole milk cartons, unopened. A package of sliced cheese. Apples in a drawer. Everything looked staged, like someone had stocked it that evening for a showing.
I closed it and opened the cabinet above the sink. Empty. I opened the next one. A single box of crackers, unopened, and a can of beans. I pulled the pantry door open.
It was worse than I remembered. Two boxes of instant oatmeal. Nothing else at toddler height. No bread. No bananas. The floor of the pantry was clean enough to eat off, which told me no one had been cooking in there.
"This is what the camera sees all day?" I asked. I turned to him. "Milk they can't open? Cheese they can't reach? You fill a fridge for the picture and leave the cabinets empty?"
His jaw tightened. That same tense profile I'd seen from outside a minute before.
"That fridge was stocked this morning," he said. "My housekeeper shops on Tuesdays. You don't know our routine."
"I know Rosaline asked me for more last night and you weren't in the house," I said. "I know Camille cried because the bowl was empty and I had nothing else to give her. That's what your camera caught, too, if you watched more than the part where I'm at the window."
He looked at his phone again, at the paused clip of me handing the bowl through the bars. Then, slowly, he pressed play. This time he turned the volume up.
We heard it. Faint, through the camera mic: my voice, "Eat slowly, sweethearts," and then Camille's small whimper, and Rosaline whispering, "More?"
He stopped it.
For a second neither of us breathed. The realization landed on both of us at the same time, and I saw it in his eyes before he said anything. The footage proved I'd been trespassing to feed his kids. It also proved his kids were hungry enough at one in the morning to take food from a woman outside a barred window.
"It cuts both ways," I said quietly.
He slipped his phone into the pocket of his dark gray suit. He didn't look at the toddlers, who were still standing at the sill in the next room, quiet now, holding that pink rabbit between them.
"You need to leave the property," he said. His voice was even, like he was reading a line he'd rehearsed. "Right now. Don't come back to the window. If I see you on the camera again, I call the sheriff. Do you understand?"
I nodded. My throat was dry.
He didn't call anyone that night. He didn't touch me. He just held the side door open and watched me step back out into the dark blue cold. I picked up the dented bowl from the sill where I'd left it. The iron bars were still between us.
May you like
"Leave the bowl," he said from the doorway.
I set it down on the exterior ledge and walked away across the grass, empty-handed, with the red light of that dome camera blinking above the sill behind me.
