A pause, the voice growing hard, icy, something you could pierce someone’s eye with. “I’d rather take this call alone with Mrs. Keller.” Annie doesn’t argue. She puts the phone back in the cradle, puts her head in her hands.

She goes upstairs to the door, presses her ear against it. But Mrs. Keller’s breathing is too shallow, her voice too low, for Annie to make out anything.

Annie feels discombobulated, disjointed, like she is composed of separate moving parts floating in space. She goes to her room, shuts the door, lies back on her bed, and puts her hand down her pants, feeling herself down there, reminding herself she’s intact. Suzy is down for a nap.

They won’t fire you, whispers one of her childhood companions. There’s too much going on right now. They won’t want Suzy’s life to be disrupted any more than it already has been. The voice is even-toned, soothing, rich hot chocolate right before spring. Besides, she’s yours. Even if they were to banish you from the house, you have all the strength in the world to get your own child back. You know what you’re doing.

Annie nods. She does. She has her plan in place.

Later, she will learn that Suzy had said something distressing to one of her teachers, to Mrs. Keenan who had come to the house months ago. While playing with a baby doll, feeding it a bottle, putting it in a little stroller during playtime and zooming around the carpet, she’d said, “Mama’s leaving. But I won’t leave.”

Mrs. Keenan had leaned away from trying to stop a boy intent on crashing his dump truck into a pile of blocks a little girl had built, and asked Suzy what she meant by that. Suzy had looked at her, stuck her thumb in her mouth. “Mama is going away.”

“Where is she going?” Mrs. Keenan asked.

“She’s going into the jungle like Tiger. Away, away, away,” and she’d tossed the baby doll facedown on the ground and closed its eyes. “Like that.” She’d pointed.

Mrs. Keenan, that inquisitive woman, had wanted to let it slide. Kids say strange things all the time, especially three-year-olds. But for some reason, the image had stuck with her, of this baby doll lying prone on the floor.

Which is maybe why Mrs. Keenan’s ears were cocked, why she was a bit more alert at pickup that afternoon. She usually herded the kids out of class and then stayed back to clean up and look after the ones who had to stay until three. She never ventured much into the hallway. But that day she had. And she kept hearing how the Kellers were away again, that they were always leaving the poor, overworked nanny alone with the kid.