The Babysitter

Chapter 8 — The Photo

Jess started noticing things after that. That was the problem with the recording — once she’d heard it, she couldn’t unhear it, and once she couldn’t unhear it, the whole house started talking. The gap in the baseboard. The way Sarah always glanced at Tommy’s bedroom door when she thought no one was looking. The way Mark’s jaw tightened whenever Tommy said the word “man.”

The fourth Friday, she arrived early — six-forty, because her mom had needed the car by seven and it was either early or never. Sarah was still upstairs getting ready, hair dryer going, and Tommy was in the backyard hunting for what he called “fossils,” which were rocks, loudly narrating his expedition to no one.

So Jess had ten unsupervised minutes in the living room.

She didn’t mean to snoop. She meant to look at the photos, which is different. Everyone looks at the photos. It’s practically a law of babysitting — you arrive early, you study the mantel, you learn the family’s mythology in frames.

The Callahans’ mantel was a gallery: Sarah and Mark’s wedding, both of them laughing mid-vow, Sarah’s veil caught in the wind. A beach trip, Tommy as a toddler eating sand with tremendous commitment. Tommy as a baby. Tommy missing his two front teeth, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. The three of them in front of a Christmas tree, matching pajamas, the whole catalog-perfect tableau.

Magazine people. Magazine life.

And then, at the far end, half-hidden behind a squat ceramic vase: a smaller frame, older, the silver tarnished green at the edges. Sarah as a teenager — maybe sixteen, all big eyes and braces-era smile — grinning with her arm around—

Jess leaned in, vase nudged aside.

The photo had been cut. Not torn — *cut*, with scissors, in a clean straight vertical line right down the middle. Sarah’s arm was draped around empty air, her hand resting on nothing. On the visible half, the background showed a backyard, a wooden fence, half a barbecue grill, a corner of blue sky. The other half was just gone, the cut edge white and sharp against the image.

Jess picked up the frame, her pulse quickening for no reason she could name. On the back, in faded pencil, in a teenager’s loopy handwriting: *Sarah, 16*.

“Jess?”

She nearly dropped it. Sarah was standing in the living room doorway, one earring in, the other in her hand, watching her with an expression Jess couldn’t read.

“I was just — sorry, I was looking at the pictures.” Jess held the frame up, feeling caught, feeling twelve. “This one’s — it looks like it got cut.”

Sarah crossed the room faster than Jess expected — three quick strides — and took the frame from her hands. Her fingers were cold.

“Old photo,” Sarah said. “It got damaged years ago. I keep meaning to throw it out.”

She set it back behind the vase — further back this time, nearly invisible, the tarnished silver winking out behind ceramic — and turned away. But not before Jess saw her face.

Sarah wasn’t embarrassed about a damaged photo. She was scared. It was there in the white around her mouth, in the way her hand lingered on the vase like she needed it to stay upright.

“Who was in the other half?” Jess asked, and immediately wanted to bite her tongue off. Detective’s daughter. Couldn’t leave a question unasked.

Sarah’s hand stilled on the vase. For a long moment, the only sound was Tommy shouting triumphantly in the backyard — *”FOSSIL! JESS, I FOUND A HUGE ONE!”* — and the hair-dryer-quiet hum of the house.

“Nobody important,” Sarah said at last. “Someone who isn’t part of our lives anymore.”

She smiled then — the bright, brittle hostess smile Jess had seen a hundred times, the one that never reached her eyes — and called out, “Tommy! Time to come in, baby!” in a voice pitched just slightly too high, and swept out of the room.

Jess stood alone in the living room, staring at the vase hiding the frame hiding the half-photo.

Tommy chose that moment to thunder in from the backyard, cupping something in both hands. “Look! It’s got stripes — that means it’s a *special* fossil.” It was a rock. It had no stripes. Jess told him it was definitely special, and he beamed, and for a few minutes the evening was just an evening: snacks, a cartoon, Tommy narrating his rock’s entire geological history.

But every time Jess glanced at the mantel, her eyes went to the vase. To the tarnished silver winking out behind it. To the girl with her arm around no one.

That night, after the bedtime routine, after Tommy’s breathing went soft and even, Jess couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the clean scissor line. About Sarah’s cold fingers. About the way she’d said *nobody important* the way people say things that are the exact opposite of true.

Nobody cuts a person out of a photograph because they’re *not important*. You cut them out because they matter too much, or because looking at them hurts too much, or because you’re trying to pretend they were never there at all.

She thought about Tommy’s crayon drawing, still stuck to the fridge downstairs with a magnet shaped like an apple. *THE MAN IN MY CLOSET.*

She thought about the footsteps in the wall. The breath on the recording.

And she thought about Sarah’s face — not tired-mom tired, but something older and deeper, like a woman holding a door shut with her whole body weight while smiling for the neighbors.

At eleven, when the Callahans got home, Sarah hugged Jess goodbye at the door and pressed an extra twenty into her hand, folded small.

“You’re so good with him,” Sarah whispered, and her eyes were shiny in the porch light. “Thank you. Really.”

Jess walked home under a sky full of indifferent stars, the twenty-dollar bill folded in her pocket, her breath fogging in the October air, and all she could think was:

*Someone who isn’t part of our lives anymore.*

Then why keep the half with the empty arm? Why keep it at all?