“They were okay. We missed your cooking.” He adjusts the band of his robe, and Annie instinctively looks away. “We used to go on trips before Suzy was born. Belle is Jewish, as you know, but barely religious. Doesn’t even celebrate Hanukkah. So we’d pack all the family stuff into a couple of days, spend Christmas in whatever place we’d decided to go that year. Honduras. Sri Lanka. I don’t even like traveling, but Belle does, of course. I always get bad jet lag. It takes a week for me to adjust. But Belle is one of those people who can just hop off a twenty-hour flight and start her day the minute she’s put her bags down.”

“Why didn’t you compromise?” Annie says, the question slipping out like drool. “If you didn’t like to travel, she shouldn’t have made you.”

Mr. Keller blinks, furrows his brow. “But that’s what she wanted to do. I like to please her.” Annie nods, heads up the stairs, pausing to pick up one last toy, a Barbie, naked from the waist up, her eyes so chipped she looks like she’s grimacing.

That evening, Annie goes into her bathroom with the nail clippers. She thinks about that window in Suzy’s room, the one that wasn’t childproofed when she began to work here. She brings the hooked nail cleaner and swipes it across the side of her left arm in careful, even strokes. Little bits of herself dribble into the sink. At that moment, the radiator hisses, and to Annie it sounds like acquiescence, like the house knows, that it’s telling her to do it, that this is the way to keep Suzy safe.

Anyway, she enjoys the tingle of it, the way her eyes widen to show all the white as she stares at herself, at the blood in the mirror. She won’t lose time again. Not like she did over Christmas. Not now that she has a plan, something cracking and hatching in her brain, in her heart.

The next day at pickup, she stands near Aine. Everyone is grumbling about the end of break, describing the food they ate, the family they saw. They’ve learned not to engage Annie, that she is much more interested in getting Suzy and leaving than in chitchat. They give her a wide berth. Maybe they believe she’s stuck-up, that her youth makes her exempt from idle small talk.