That last morning, Nancy was nervy and pale. She’d hardly slept, thinking about Cheryl’s unexpected request, worrying about having refused it and yet still feeling she couldn’t possibly agree to it. She kept looking at Cheryl as she went round collecting her things for the day – papers, briefcase, laptop, purse, coat – trying to figure out if Cheryl was upset or sulking. It was impossible to tell. Cheryl looked the same as she always did. She looked calm. She looked stolid. She looked heavy and reliable. Nancy hadn’t said anything to Beecham about Cheryl wanting to borrow Bunny in case he got worked up about it, in case he said, ‘She asked you what?’ and brought the whole thing up in front of Cheryl while they were getting ready to leave for the station and Cheryl was giving Bunny his breakfast.

Nancy found herself lingering longer than usual, beyond their normal deadline for heading out of the house to the car. She checked and re-checked the contents of her briefcase, her purse. She re-applied her lipstick. She stood looking at Cheryl mashing up Bunny’s breakfast banana with a fork. Out in the driveway Beecham leaned on the horn and Nancy, feeling panicky and tearful and strange, wanted to say to Cheryl, ‘Please, Cheryl, don’t leave us.’

The names of Cheryl’s children were Stanley, Webster and Yolisha. Stanley was 8, Webster was 7 and Yolisha was 5 and Cheryl hadn’t seen them in four years because if she ever went back home to Haiti to visit them she’d never get back in through immigration again.

‘I can’t do this,’ she’d said to her grandmother on the phone when she first arrived – when she first started housekeeping for Mrs Landis in New Rochelle.

‘How are we going to live, baby, if you don’t?’ said her grandmother.

In the beginning, when Stanley was 4 and Webster was 3 and Yolisha was 1, she’d talked to her children once a month on the phone, but after the first few months they’d grown too shy to speak to a stranger. All Cheryl could hear when her grandmother put them on the line was their soft breathing and after a time she’d let them be, it seemed too hard a thing for them all.

Which was how, after Mrs Landis went to live in the retirement home in Phoenix and Cheryl came to work for the Clays, she’d fallen in love with Bunny.