I was pretty certain Mrs. Boucher had started seeing someone. She’d taken extra care the last few months getting ready to go out. She’d be distracted when she came back, and several times, when I got into the car to be driven home, I’d smelled something other than Mrs. Boucher’s lemony scent—some kind of cologne. But there were other things, things I hadn’t told Marie or Sage. Lately, when the Volvo turned in from the road, the headlights would briefly hit the glass walls of the living room, only for a moment, and then cut. The car would stay there, sometimes for as long as an hour, and then the headlights would switch on again and the car would crawl down the drive to the house. The first time it happened, I was terrified, wondering who was sitting in the car, watching me inside the lit glass room. I sat still on the couch waiting, and eventually the car moved again. And it was only Mrs. Boucher.

With the lights on inside the house, Mrs. Boucher could see me, but I couldn’t see out. I wondered if I was being tested, to see what kind of babysitter I was. The second night I got up and tidied and made sure the dishes were done, seeing myself as if from the outside, like I was in a film and had an audience. But by the fourth time the Volvo pulled into the driveway and the lights cut, I was pretty certain that Mrs. Boucher wouldn’t be wasting all that time just to watch me. I wondered if she was sad and found it hard to come into the house, the way my mother sometimes just sat in the parked car in the garage after she had come home, as if she had to brace herself before facing all of us.

The last few weeks I’d been turning off the sound on the television, listening, and I thought I heard a car door shut before the headlights came back on. Was someone else in the car with Mrs. Boucher? She told me once that she was never afraid living deep in the woods in a tree house, that it was the most private place in the world. I didn’t want to spy on her, and I hadn’t told anyone what I’d heard and seen.

Late the same night that I told Mrs. Boucher about Ellen, I was standing at her sink squeezing a tea bag when the headlights swiped through the woods and across the windows. For a brief second my stomach lurched, thinking it was Wilson. But then the lights cut, and I knew it was only Mrs. Boucher, home again.

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