On the table in the hallway she saw that Cheryl had already got ready a supply of Bunny’s things to take with her – two clean empty bottles, a tin of formula, four diapers in a Ziploc baggie, a packet of oatmeal cereal, the emerald-green shirt.

Nancy didn’t know what to say.

She had a horror, a terror, of offending Cheryl, of making her think she wasn’t trusted, of upsetting her so much with a refusal that in the morning she’d announce that she was leaving, she’d found another family to work for, another Bunny to take care of.

Nancy flailed for some sort of practical objection. Where would he sleep? Did Cheryl have a spare bedroom at her place? Did she possess a crib?

A vague picture came into Nancy’s mind of a shabby apartment building, a corridor with a door at the end of it, and it occurred to her that she didn’t actually know where Cheryl lived. It had always been enough that Cheryl arrived every morning at 6:45 on their doorstep and Nancy was embarrassed now, in the middle of this awkward and unexpected conversation, to ask.

Cheryl said she would make a nest for Bunny on the floor next to her bed out of pillows and blankets.

‘Oh I don’t know, Cheryl,’ said Nancy.

Still holding onto Bunny, she smoothed his soft hair with the palm of her hand and touched his cheek with her finger. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I’m sorry, Cheryl, no.’

Cheryl’s response was impossible to read. Her broad black face looked the same as always: placid, inscrutable, almost blank.

It’s astonishing, really, the things Nancy and Beecham Clay never knew about their babysitter.

The things she never told them and the things they never felt the need to ask about – that her surname was Toussaint for example, and that she lived in a small dark room above the consignment store on Mamaroneck Avenue, and that she was twenty-five years old and had been born in 1975 in the Cité Soleil district of Port-au-Prince and that when she arrived in the United States in 1997 she’d left behind three children of her own.

In a general way of course they understood that Cheryl was here for the money, pure and simple. In a general way they knew this was how things were, and even if they didn’t dwell upon the details they probably had a fair idea that at the end of every week when she’d been paid, Cheryl walked out of their house and along Orienta Avenue and turned left onto the Post Road and walked the remaining hundred yards to the A&P where the Western Union counter was and dipped her hand into her cracked plastic purse and took out Nancy’s envelope with the dollar bills inside, kept back what she needed for her own rent, and sent the rest home.