The Babysitter

Chapter 3 — Kids Imagine

Tommy was asleep by 9:15. Jess knew because she checked — twice — standing in his doorway listening to the deep, even breathing of a kid who had argued for two stories and lost consciousness halfway through the concept of tomorrow.

Downstairs, the house felt bigger without him in it. Jess helped herself to mint chocolate chip ice cream — Sarah had said *anything*, and Jess chose to believe that included the premium stuff — and curled up on the white couch with her phone. She texted Maya: *kid asleep. 100 dollars. the civic fund grows.* Maya wrote back: *u r living the dream. im babysitting twins who bite.* Jess sent a crown emoji and felt, briefly, like the luckiest seventeen-year-old in Pennsylvania.

She put on a reality show she’d already seen and scrolled, and for a while it was exactly the evening she’d signed up for: easy money, a quiet house, nothing to do but exist. The chandelier glittered over the dining room. The refrigerator hummed its one-note song. Somewhere, a clock ticked with the smug regularity of a house that had never once been late for anything.

Halfway through the episode she got restless and wandered. The hallway photos, up close, were aggressively wholesome: the Callahans at a beach, Tommy missing a tooth and holding a crab like a trophy; the Callahans in front of a Christmas tree, all three of them in matching pajamas. Every frame was white. Every smile was scheduled. Jess stood there in the lemon-smelling quiet and felt, for no reason she could name, like she was in a model home and the real family lived somewhere else.

At 10:30 she went up to check on him. Good sitters checked. Great sitters checked and didn’t wake anyone up.

The upstairs hallway was dark except for the blue seam of light under Tommy’s door. She eased it open. Rocket nightlight. Glow stars. Tommy on his back, mouth open, one arm flung over his stuffed triceratops like he’d passed out mid-battle. Perfect.

She was turning to go when she heard it.

It came from inside the wall — the wall between Tommy’s room and whatever was on the other side — a soft, low sound. A knock. Not loud. Deliberate, almost. The way someone knocks when they don’t want to be heard knocking.

Jess froze.

Silence. The hum of the refrigerator, far below. The tick of the hallway clock.

Then it came again — fainter this time, or maybe she was imagining the second one because she wanted — no. There it was. A slow creak, like weight shifting on old wood. But there was no floor inside a wall. There was nothing in there to shift weight *on*.

She counted the seconds between sounds the way her dad had taught her to count seconds between lightning and thunder. Four. Then nine. No pattern she could find, which somehow felt worse than a pattern.

Her heart was doing something loud and unhelpful in her ears. She pressed her palm flat against the drywall. Cool. Still. Nothing.

“Okay,” she whispered to the empty hallway. “Okay. Old house. Pipes.”

It wasn’t that old a house, a voice in her head pointed out. The development looked late nineties, tops. She told the voice to shut up.

Pipes cooled. Wood settled. Furnaces kicked on and made the whole skeleton of a house groan — she’d read that somewhere, or maybe her dad had said it. Every house she’d ever babysat in made noises. The Hendersons’ place clicked like a metronome all night. The Alvarez house had a fridge that sounded like it was plotting something. Houses were just big, creaky animals. Kids imagined men in closets, and babysitters — apparently — imagined knocks in walls.

She pulled out her phone and googled *knocking sound inside wall at night*. The results were reassuring and useless in equal measure: thermal expansion, water hammer, pipes contracting as they cooled. *Or,* one forum suggested helpfully, *a horror movie.* She opened her texts, typed *hey quick question does your house make weird—* and deleted it, because there was no version of that text that didn’t make her sound insane.

She stood in Tommy’s doorway a second time, just watching him sleep. The room was fine. Normal. A kid, a nightlight, glow stars doing their quiet glow thing. It made her feel better. It also, unreasonably, made her feel worse.

Still. She found herself walking the hallway, trying to work out what was on the other side of Tommy’s wall. Bathroom was at the far end. Linen closet next to it. She pressed her ear to the linen closet door and heard absolutely nothing, which proved nothing, and made her feel ridiculous, which proved everything.

She stood in Tommy’s doorway one more time. The room was fine. Normal. A sleeping kid, a nightlight, glow stars doing their quiet glow thing. The closet doors were shut tight, the way she’d left them.

*See?* she told herself. *Nothing.*

She went back downstairs. She turned the TV down low — *so she wouldn’t wake him,* she told herself, and almost believed it — and tried to watch. But every time the show went quiet, she found herself listening past it, her whole body tuned like an antenna toward the ceiling.

Her phone buzzed. Dad: *all good?*

*kid’s asleep. house is weirdly quiet* she wrote.

*that’s the dream. home by 11:30.*

She set the phone down. The show ended. She didn’t notice. And at 10:58, Jess caught herself doing something she would never, ever admit to Maya:

She was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, phone forgotten in her hand, holding her breath —

— waiting for the wall to do it again.