The Babysitter

Chapter 7 — Mark

Jess didn’t sleep much that night. She lay in her own bed with one earbud in, the voice memo on loop, listening to those three footsteps and that breath until her dad knocked on her doorframe at two in the morning and asked why her light was still on.

“Homework,” she’d said.

“At two a.m.? Jess.”

“APUSH waits for no one, Dad.”

He’d given her the look — the detective look — and said, “Lights out,” and she’d obeyed, and then lain awake in the dark listening to nothing at all, which somehow felt worse.

Saturday morning she sat at the kitchen table picking at pancakes while her dad read the paper and her mom argued with the coffee maker. Normal. Safe. A house where the walls didn’t breathe.

“How was the Callahan kid?” her dad asked, not looking up from the sports page.

“Fine,” Jess said. “Tommy’s cute. Smart.”

“Cute and weird is the best combination. That’s your mother and me.”

“Hey,” her mom said, brandishing a spatula.

Jess almost told him about the recording. Detective Cole had spent twenty years telling her that if something felt wrong, she should say so — to him, to anyone, out loud, before it grew teeth. *Say it early, Jess. Secrets get heavy.*

But this — footsteps in a wall, a breath on a phone recording — sounded insane out loud. Kids imagine things. Houses make noises. Old radiators, settling foundations, the thousand small complaints of wood and plaster. And Sarah had looked so *tired* when she’d asked Jess to go easy on the closet stuff. Tired moms didn’t need a seventeen-year-old babysitter spinning ghost stories.

She kept it to herself. Which, later, she would regret more than almost anything.

The next Friday, Mark answered the door instead of Sarah.

“Hey, Jess. Sarah’s running late — client dinner downtown. She’ll be back around ten, I’ll be back by eleven.”

Tommy was already halfway up the stairs shouting something about showing her his new Lego set, so Jess found herself alone in the foyer with Mark, who stood there in a golf shirt and khakis looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

She hadn’t planned to say it. It just came out, the way things do when you’ve been turning them over for a week.

“Mr. Callahan — can I ask you something? About Tommy.”

Mark’s eyebrows went up. “Sure. Everything okay?”

“He keeps talking about a man. In his closet. He says the man visits every night.” She kept her voice light, casual, babysitter-concerned rather than accusatory. “I just wondered — has he always… is it a phase, or—”

Something crossed Mark’s face. Quick, like a hand passing over a candle flame. Gone before she could name it, but she’d seen it — every kid of a detective learns to see it.

“Kids,” he said lightly. “Big imaginations. You should’ve heard the stuff I came up with at his age.”

“Yeah, I know, but he’s so specific about it. And last week I heard—” She stopped. She didn’t want to play the recording for Mark. Not yet. Not until she understood what it was, not until she’d ruled out every normal explanation, because once you play someone a recording of footsteps in their wall, you can’t unplay it. “I heard something in the wall. Footsteps, kind of. Has anyone ever checked? Like, could there be — I don’t know, an animal? Raccoons get in walls, right? Squirrels?”

Mark went very still.

“Jess,” he said, and his voice had dropped half an octave, the easy golf-shirt dad gone like he’d never been there. “Listen to me. There is no man. There are no footsteps. Tommy is six years old and he has nightmares, and the *worst* thing you can do — for him, for us — is ask him questions that make the nightmares feel real.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“I know.” He exhaled through his nose, rubbed the back of his neck, and the tension in his shoulders eased by a fraction — but only a fraction. “I know you’re trying to help. But Sarah and I have worked really hard to get him past this. Therapy, night-lights, the whole thing. When you ask him about the man, he thinks *you* believe in him. Understand? It undoes everything.”

The word *therapy* landed strangely. They’d never mentioned therapy before.

“I understand,” Jess said. “I won’t bring it up.”

“Good.” Mark smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and Jess thought about how Sarah smiled the same way — the same bright, stretched, not-reaching-the-eyes smile, like it was a family trait, like they’d practiced it together in a mirror. “Have fun tonight. Don’t let him talk you into a second dessert. He’ll try. He’s a lawyer in training.”

He went upstairs to change, and Jess stood in the foyer listening to his footsteps on the stairs — normal footsteps, in the open air, going up and away, each one exactly where footsteps were supposed to be.

That night, after Tommy was asleep — out cold by nine-fifteen, the Lego set abandoned mid-build — Jess stood in his bedroom doorway and looked at the closet. The door was open three inches, exactly like always. The night-light threw its amber glow across the carpet.

She didn’t go near it. Mark’s warning was still ringing in her ears, and besides, she’d already looked inside once. Clothes. Shoeboxes. Nothing.

But she stood there a long time, and she noticed something she hadn’t before: the baseboard along the wall beside the closet didn’t quite meet the floor. There was a gap — a thin, dark line, no wider than a fingernail, running the length of the wall from the closet to the corner.

Just a gap. Old houses settle. That’s all it was. Houses in Pennsylvania, a hundred years old, they shift, they breathe, they—

She stopped herself. *Breathe.* She was using the word *breathe* about a house now.

She told herself it was nothing all the way downstairs. She was still telling herself it was nothing at midnight, in her own bed, listening to the voice memo again with the volume low so her parents wouldn’t hear.

Three footsteps. A breath. A gap in the baseboard wide enough to slide a fingernail into.

She turned the recording off and stared at the ceiling, and for the first time, a thought she didn’t want slid into her head like a draft under a door:

*What if Tommy isn’t imagining anything at all?*