NEEVA, THE LUSSES’ NANNY, still very much rattled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, left the children in the care of her nephew, Emile, while her daughter, Sebastiane, drove her back to Bronxville. She had kept the Luss children, Keene and his eight-year-old sister, Audrey, eating Frosted Flakes for lunch, and cubed fruit, things Neeva had taken with her from the Luss house when she’d fled.

Now she was returning for more. The Luss children wouldn’t eat her Haitian cooking, and—more pressingly—Neeva had forgotten Keene’s Pulmicort, his asthma medication. The boy was wheezing and looking pasty.

They pulled in to find Mrs. Guild’s green car in the Lusses’ driveway, the sight of which gave Neeva pause. She told Sebastiane to wait for her there, then got out and straightened her slip beneath her dress, going with her key to the side entrance. The door opened without any tone, the house alarm not set. Neeva walked through the perfectly appointed mudroom with built-in cubbies and coat hooks and heated tile floor—a mudroom that had never seen any mud—and pushed through the French doors into the kitchen.

It did not appear that anyone had been in the room since she had left with the children. She stood still inside the doorway and listened with extraordinary attention, holding her breath for as long as she could before exhaling. She heard nothing.

“Hallo?” she called a few times, wondering if Mrs. Guild, with whom she had a largely silent relationship—the housekeeper, Neeva suspected, was a silent racist—would answer. Wondering if Joan—a mother so devoid of natural maternal instinct as to be, for all her lawyerly success, like a child herself—would answer. And knowing, in both cases, that they would not.

Hearing nothing, she crossed to the central island and laid her bag gently down on it, between the sink and the countertop range. She opened the snack cabinet, and quickly, a bit more like a thief than she had imagined, filled a Food Emporium bag with crackers and juice pouches and Smartfood popcorn—stopping once in a while to listen.

After raiding the paneled refrigerator of string cheese and yogurt drinks, she noticed Mr. Luss’s number on the contact sheet taped to the wall near the kitchen phone. A bolt of uncertainty shot through her. What could she say to him? Your wife is ill. She is not right. So I take the children. No. As it was, she barely exchanged words with the man. There was something evil in this magnificent house, and her first and only duty—both as an employee and as a mother herself—was the safety of the children.