Oh, I remember. We were trying out a new sitter, a friend of a friend of a friend’s nanny, a high-strung girl who had just called in a panic after Baxter projectile vomited his spaghetti dinner over the antique Beni Ourain and was running a 102-degree temperature. Cam was in the kitchen, cooking for a CEO roundtable, leaders of Atlanta’s Fortune 500s crammed into the private room, and his truck was in the shop. With my car stuck in the lot, it took me twice as long to get home in an Uber.

But the bigger point is that he remembers, which means he was there. He saw me throw that fit.

A Lasky employee, then? A client?

“Tell you what,” he says when I don’t respond. “Let’s stick a pin in this subject for now. Just until I get back, so...don’t move, okay?” He laughs—another stupid, pathetic joke. “Hang tight while I go check on the kids.”

As soon as he’s gone, I lurch forward at the waist and tug at the rope with my teeth. The guy is smart, positioning the knot on the far side of my wrist, too far for me to reach with my mouth, so my first task is to somehow rotate the rope until the knot is on top. I bite and pull, bite and pull, nudging the rope along with little flicks of my wrist. It drags over the skin of my arm in millimeter increments, painful and excruciatingly slow.

Words float in disconnected fragments across the hall.

...Mommy...talk to her...very important.

Bax again, speaking in Baxter code. The more trifling the request, the more urgently it is delivered. He wants to tell me about a pretty blue bird that’s perched on the windowsill, probably, or an unreachable itch in the center of his back. How long have we been upstairs—twenty minutes at the most? Even with the cartoons blaring, it’s long past the limit for a six-year-old to sit still and be quiet. The question is, how much will the masked man tolerate?

The man’s voice comes in a low murmur, too faint for me to hear.