The Babysitter

Chapter 15 — My Father

Dinner was lasagna, and Jess pushed it around her plate while her parents talked about the neighbors’ new fence. Normal. Everything was normal. Her mom asked about school. Her dad asked about the babysitting job. Jess said “fine” to everything, and nobody noticed her hands shaking when she reached for her water glass.

“You saw your father today,” her mom said, brightening. “He told me he stopped by the school. What was that about?”

“Just work stuff,” Jess said quickly. “Asking about the neighborhood where I babysit. Boring police stuff.”

Her dad glanced at her over his lasagna. Just a glance — but Jess felt it like a weight. “Routine canvassing,” he said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

And she almost believed him. That was the worst part. Sitting at her own dinner table, eating her mother’s lasagna, she almost believed that the man across from her — the man who’d taught her to ride a bike, who cried at her middle-school graduation — was just doing routine police work, and that the Callahans were just a normal family, and that she was just a normal babysitter.

Almost.

After dinner, her dad went to his study — the little room off the hallway with the locked filing cabinet and the desk that was always, always covered in case files. Jess had learned years ago not to touch anything in there. “Active investigations,” her dad always said. “Eyes only, kiddo.”

She was passing the open doorway on her way to get her phone charger when she saw it.

The file was open on his desk, right there, like he’d forgotten to close it. A robbery case — she could see the words “ARMED ROBBERY” stamped across the top in red. And paper-clipped to the inside cover, a photograph.

A young man’s face. Gaunt. Dark hair. Gray-green eyes.

Jess stopped breathing.

She knew that face. She’d seen it in the dark behind Tommy’s closet, lit by the glow of a face-down phone. She’d seen it crying at a kitchen table, begging her not to tell. She’d seen it — half of it, torn away — in a trash can, cut out of a family photograph.

Ray.

The suspect photo was Ray. The same face. The same eyes. Older now, thinner, worn down by three months in a wall — but unmistakable.

Her hands were shaking as she stepped closer, close enough to read the typed label under the photo: RAYMOND HALE. WANTED — ARMED ROBBERY, GETAWAY DRIVER. And beneath that, in her father’s neat block handwriting, a note: *Derek Voss cooperating. Believes Hale planned the job. Canvass Maple St. — sister’s address?*

She shouldn’t have kept reading. She knew she shouldn’t. But her eyes moved down the page on their own, the way they’d moved across Tommy’s closet wall, finding the seam that didn’t belong.

*Hale, Raymond. DOB 03/14/2001. Last known address — sister Sarah Callahan, Maple Street.* There was a second photo paper-clipped behind the first: a wider shot, a booking photo of a heavier, healthier Ray with short hair and a defiant stare. He looked like a different person. Three months in a wall had carved him down to something else entirely.

*Considered non-violent but flight risk. Do not approach alone.*

Sister’s address. Sarah. Her father was looking for Sarah’s address. Her father had been at her school asking about the Callahans’ street because —

Because he was hunting Ray.

The realization hit her like a physical blow. The routine questions. The notebook. “Have you noticed anything odd around their street?” He hadn’t been canvassing a neighborhood. He’d been circling a suspect’s family. He’d been using his own daughter as an informant without telling her — sitting across from her in a school conference room, asking her to report on the family that trusted her with their child. And she’d sat there and lied — lied to her father’s face, smoothly, easily — to protect a fugitive.

“Jess?”

She spun. Her dad was standing in the doorway, a mug of coffee in his hand, his face unreadable.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked quietly.

“Nothing. I — my charger. I thought I left it—” The words tumbled out, too fast, too guilty.

He looked at her. Then he looked past her, at the desk, at the open file. Something shifted in his expression — a detective’s instinct, the same instinct she’d inherited, clicking into place.

“You saw it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Jess’s mind was racing, screaming. Her father — her father, who ruffled her hair and made bad jokes about hot sauce — was hunting Ray. The man in the walls. The boy who cried in the dark. The uncle Tommy loved.

All this time, her father had been the thing Ray was hiding from. And she — she was the babysitter. She was the one who knew where he was.

“Dad,” she whispered. “That man in the photo—”

“Is a fugitive,” her father said, his voice suddenly flat and professional, the dad gone, the detective standing in his place. “Armed robbery. Someone got shot, Jess. A man took a bullet because of that crew. If you know anything — anything at all — you need to tell me. Right now.”

Jess looked at the photo. At her father’s face. At the red stamp: ARMED ROBBERY.

And the world tilted — the floor dropping out from under everything she thought she knew about her family, her job, the quiet house on Maple Street, and the gaunt young man hiding in its walls.

Because now she understood. She was standing between two people she loved — her father, who hunted, and Ray, who hid. And whatever she did next, someone was going to get hurt.