The Babysitter

Chapter 5 — Sarah’s Eyes

Jess went back downstairs and tried to be a normal person.

She put the ice cream back. She wiped the counter. She folded the blanket she’d used into a neat square, because the Callahans’ house demanded neat squares the way other houses demanded nothing. She sat on the white couch and stared at the television without seeing it, and every thirty seconds her eyes drifted up toward the ceiling, toward Tommy’s room, toward the closet with the hollow back wall and the empty, stale-smelling box. At one point she caught her reflection in the dark window and practiced her *everything’s fine* face. It needed work.

At 11:38, headlights swept the driveway.

*Okay,* she thought, standing up. *Normal. They’re home. Everything is fine.*

The garage door rumbled. A car door thumped. Voices, low and tired, in the kitchen — and before Jess could talk herself out of it, she was already moving, taking the stairs two at a time, because she wanted to do one last check on Tommy before she had to smile and say *he was an angel* and mean it.

She slipped into his room. Asleep. Perfect. Breathing even.

And then, like her feet had their own agenda, she was standing in front of the closet again. Just looking at the doors. Her hand was half-raised — she wasn’t going to open them, she was just —

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

Sarah Callahan stood in the doorway.

For one unguarded half-second, Sarah’s face was not smiling. It was something else entirely — something sharp and naked and raw. Fear, pure and undisguised, the face of a woman who has walked into a room and found the worst thing she can imagine.

Then the smile slammed down like a shutter.

“Jess?” Sarah’s voice was light. Too light. “Everything okay?”

Jess’s brain, which noticed everything, was screaming. Her mouth, which had been caught standing in a six-year-old’s bedroom at midnight staring at his closet, did the only thing it could do. It lied.

“He cried out — I thought I heard him cry out. I was just checking.”

Smooth. Embarrassingly smooth. Her dad would have been proud and then grounded her.

Sarah’s eyes moved. To the closet doors. To Jess’s half-raised hand. Back to Jess’s face. The whole trip took maybe two seconds, but each stop lasted a beat too long, like Sarah was photographing the scene and filing it somewhere. Jess had seen that look before — on her dad’s face, across an interrogation table on take-your-daughter-to-work day. The look of someone deciding what you know.

“He’s a heavy sleeper,” Sarah said lightly. “You didn’t have to come up.”

It sounded like reassurance. It landed like a warning.

They went downstairs together, Sarah’s hand hovering near Jess’s elbow without quite touching it, the way you’d guide someone away from the edge of something. In the kitchen, Mark was loosening his tie, and the normalcy of him — the tired-dad smile, the *how was he?* — felt like a life raft.

“An angel,” Jess said. “Negotiated two stories out of me. The stegosaurus helped.”

Mark laughed. Sarah counted bills out of her wallet and added them to the envelope — and then, after the smallest hesitation, added one more. A twenty. “For the late pickup,” she said. “We really appreciate you, Jess.”

A hundred and twenty dollars. The easy money had just gotten easier. But the envelope felt heavier than it should have, sitting in Jess’s hand.

Sarah walked her to the door. At the threshold, she held Jess’s gaze for a beat too long, her smile firmly, perfectly in place.

“Same time next Friday?” Sarah asked. Her smile was perfect. It had been perfect all night, Jess realized — at the door, in the kitchen, on the stairs. It was the one thing in the house that had never once slipped.

Until it had.

“Yeah,” Jess said. “Yeah, of course.”

Her dad’s car was at the curb, engine running. She must have texted him *outside* from the stairs — the night was doing strange things to her memory.

She climbed in. The car smelled like coffee and his aftershave, and it was the most normal thing in the world.

“How was it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

“Fine.”

He glanced at her. “Just fine?”

“They paid me a hundred and twenty dollars.”

He whistled. “The Civic fund grows.”

“At this rate I’ll be driving by Christmas.”

“At this rate you’ll be driving *me* around by Christmas,” he said, and she laughed, and for a minute the night felt normal again.

Then: “The kid thinks there’s a man in his closet.”

Her dad laughed — a real, warm laugh. “Classic. I was terrified of the basement until I was ten. Convinced there was a troll down there.”

“Was there?”

“There was a water heater, and it was almost as scary.”

Jess smiled. She looked back at the Callahans’ house, shrinking in the side mirror — every window golden, every shutter straight, the most perfect house on the street.

And in the upstairs window — Tommy’s window, the one with the blue nightlight glow — there was a shape. Sarah. Standing in the doorway of her son’s bedroom. Perfectly still.

Not checking on him. Not moving at all.

Just standing there in the dark, facing the closet, like a guard.

Jess told herself she was imagining it. The angle was bad. The glass was reflecting.

But she couldn’t un-see the way Sarah’s hand had gripped the doorframe on her way out of Tommy’s room — knuckles white, fingers dug in — like she was holding the whole house together.

Or holding something in.