It’s already bad enough that Suzy is in school, that after the first week she grew used to it, even telling Annie, “I’m ’sited to go!” one morning as she ate her runny eggs. She’s only gone from nine to twelve, but there are so many people, so many new faces, so many new games and toys and smells and tastes and hands that she can’t stop babbling about. There’s the boy who isn’t potty trained who wet himself in the middle of story time. The girl whose long, dark pigtails she likes, that she was apprehended for tugging. The tiny chick who lives in the Big Kids’ classroom whose feathers almost got plucked off by a Big Boy who likes to run around the playground and kick kids’ block towers down. The giant chalkboard where Suzy can draw anything she likes, anywhere, and it can be cleaned up like magic with a wet paper towel.

Most days, Annie drives into town for pickup. Windsong isn’t anything like the daycare centers she and her siblings were thrown into, run by droopy-eyed women with too many children to handle and not enough resources, one baby doll for ten little girls.

No, Windsong has a manicured lawn, a new jungle gym, a slide so shiny it makes Annie’s teeth hurt. Inside, the walls are rainbow-striped, the classrooms filled with stations—the water table with plastic boats and rubber ducks, the reading nook, a whole corner with plants spiraling out of their pots. A shag carpet in the center for story time.

Annie marveled at it all the first time she picked up Suzy, how clean everything looked. The calendar with all the children’s birthdays, 3-D stickers next to each name. The big box of crayons, dozens of them, it seemed, with colors like burgundy or violet. The books, tons of them, neatly put away on the shelf, covered in plastic, with titles that Suzy’s teachers mentioned had just come out last year.

And the children. Bright little things with rosebud cheeks, pudgy arms, hair done up in ribbons, laces dangling untied from shoes more expensive than a week of Annie’s pay.

No one as cute, as precious, as hers, as Suzy, though. This she was certain of.

She was the youngest nanny of them all, the other ladies graying with jowly cheeks and wilting breasts, exhausted at drop-off, almost comatose at pickup. They would make small talk with her, complain about the weather, their pay, the swelling in their feet.

A week after the incident with Mrs. Keller, Annie rolled up the sleeve of her cardigan absentmindedly as she waited for Suzy to hug her teachers goodbye. Annie hated this practice, found it absurd and boundary-free. She’d always squeeze Suzy a little harder when the girl was finally relinquished from their arms and toddled over.