Chapter 1 - Under the Table
The kitchen smelled like toast going cold. That was the first wrong thing that morning. I had put two plates on the dining table at seven forty, orange juice in the small glasses Lily liked, cut the crusts off Sophie's because she wouldn't eat them if they were brown. The house was too quiet for a school day. No cartoons, no feet on the stairs, no Vanessa calling down about missing socks.
Then I heard breathing under the table.
It wasn't loud. It was the kind of sound you only catch when you're standing still with a dish towel in your hand and the refrigerator has just clicked off. Short and careful, like someone trying not to be heard. The daylight from the big windows cut bright across the tile and the wood cabinets, but under the table there was a pocket of shadow that didn't belong to anything.
My name is Maya. I was twenty-eight that morning and I had worked in that house eight months.
I set the towel down on the island and crouched by the dining table. My knees popped against the floor. Underneath, in the dim, Lily was curled with her back against the table leg. She wore her light blue pajamas, her long brown hair fallen forward over her shoulders. Sophie was tucked straight into her, face buried against Lily's chest, her shorter blonde hair mussed from sleep. Sophie held her light brown teddy bear pressed hard up against her cheek, one arm around its neck like she was holding on to keep from falling.
Lily's eyes met mine. She didn't startle. She just tightened her arm around Sophie and glanced down at her sister, then back at me, and her mouth barely moved.
"Please don't wake her."
I stayed crouched. I could see the slow movement of Lily's eyes, the way she was watching the hallway without turning her head. My breathing went shallow without me deciding it. Sophie wasn't asleep. I could tell by the grip on that bear and the way her shoulders rose too fast. She was pretending, or Lily needed me to think she was.
I didn't stand up. I lowered myself a little more until my gray sweater brushed the edge of the tablecloth and my jeans scraped the tile. I kept my voice low.
Breakfast was getting cold behind me. The stainless hood over the stove caught the daylight and threw it back too bright. I wanted to reach under there and feel Sophie's forehead, to check if she was sick, to find a normal reason for two girls to choose the hard floor over their chairs.
Then heels clicked once on the tile behind me.
Vanessa stood in the light from the windows, her dark shoulder-length hair neat, her cream blouse tucked into dark trousers. She wasn't looking under the table. She was looking at me, down at me, the way you look at someone caught somewhere they shouldn't be.
"What are you doing?"
May you like
Her shadow fell across the tabletop and cut over my hands. Lily flinched at the sound and pulled Sophie half an inch deeper into the dark. The bear's ear folded against Sophie's mouth. I could hear Lily holding her breath now, waiting for me to answer for all of us.
I didn't get up. I didn't look away from the girls. Vanessa took one step closer, her shoe loud against the kitchen floor.
