The Babysitter

Chapter 9 — The Cut

The trash went out on Tuesdays. Jess knew this because she’d started paying attention to everything about the Callahans’ house — the rhythms, the routines, the small domestic machinery of a family with something to hide. She wasn’t proud of it. She told herself she was just being observant. Her dad always said observation was a detective’s first tool, and she’d grown up at a kitchen table where cases got discussed over meatloaf.

She hadn’t planned to go through their garbage. That would be insane. That would be a line crossed, and Jess still thought of herself as a person who didn’t cross lines.

But the fifth Friday, she was taking the kitchen trash out to the garage bin — Sarah had asked her to, the bag was overflowing with the wreckage of taco night, it was a normal thing a babysitter does — and the bag split open on the garage floor.

Coffee grounds everywhere. Eggshells. A landslide of junk mail. A broken wooden spoon.

And a photograph, face-down, bent at one corner, half-buried in coffee grounds.

Jess’s heart did something complicated in her chest. She told herself to leave it. She told herself to just scoop everything into a new bag and pretend she hadn’t seen it, because whatever it was, it was in the trash, and things in the trash are in the trash for a reason.

She picked it up. She wiped the coffee grounds off with her thumb, her pulse thudding in her ears.

It was the missing half.

The cut edge matched the frame on the mantel exactly — she could see it in her mind, the clean scissor line, Sarah’s teenage arm reaching into nothing. And here was the nothing, made flesh: a young man, maybe twenty, leaning into the frame with a lopsided grin, his arm slung around Sarah’s shoulders. Dark hair falling over his forehead. Eyes the same shape as Sarah’s, the same gray-green, the same long lashes. The family resemblance was unmistakable — the same cheekbones, the same crooked smile pulling higher on the left.

He looked like Sarah, younger and male. A brother. It had to be a brother.

She turned it over. On the back, in the same faded pencil: *Sarah & —* and then the rest was scratched out. Hard. Whoever did it had pressed so deep the paper was almost torn through, the pencil lead gouged into splinters. Someone had wanted that name gone.

Jess stood in the garage with coffee grounds on her shoes, holding half a photograph, and her mind raced like a car with no brakes. A brother Sarah cut out of a picture. A brother whose name someone scratched off the back so violently it scarred the paper. A brother who “isn’t part of our lives anymore.”

And a little boy upstairs who said a man visited his closet every night.

*No*, she thought. *Don’t. Don’t connect those things. There are a hundred explanations. A falling-out. A fight. Families are complicated—*

But her hands were already moving. She folded the photo half into quarters — gently, despite everything, because it felt old and fragile — and slid it into her back pocket, her heart pounding like she’d stolen something.

Which, she supposed, she had.

She rebagged the trash with shaking hands, hauled the heavy bag to the curb bin, and went back inside to find Tommy building a Lego spaceship in the living room, humming tunelessly, tongue stuck out in concentration.

“Jess, look!” He held it up. “It has a secret compartment.” He popped open a tiny panel on the hull. “For hiding stuff. See?”

“That’s cool, buddy.”

“Everyone needs a hiding place,” Tommy said matter-of-factly, snapping the panel shut with a decisive click. “Even grown-ups.”

Jess stared at him. “What do you mean?”

Tommy shrugged, already absorbed in snapping another brick into place. “The man says so.”

The photo half burned in her back pocket all evening like it was radioactive. Through dinner — chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs, which Tommy insisted made them taste better. Through the dragon book, two chapters. Through the long bedtime negotiation that ended with Tommy asleep mid-sentence, the way kids do, like someone flipped a switch.

At home, Jess laid the photo on her desk under the lamp and studied it the way her dad studied evidence boards — systematically, corner to corner. The young man’s grin, so like Sarah’s. Sarah’s arm around his shoulders, easy and affectionate, the way you only drape yourself on someone you trust completely. The backyard, the fence, the barbecue — a summer afternoon from a decade ago, frozen and then sliced in half.

She flipped it over and ran her fingertip across the gouged-out name. Whoever did it had been angry. Or afraid. Maybe both — in Jess’s experience, the two traveled together.

She pulled out her phone and opened the voice memo. Three footsteps. A breath.

She looked at the photo. She listened to the recording. She looked at the photo again.

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

Jess opened her desk drawer, slid the photo half underneath a stack of old notebooks — APUSH notes, a dead phone charger, a ticket stub from a movie she barely remembered — and closed the drawer.

She didn’t sleep that night either. She lay awake and thought about brothers, and about scratched-out names, and about what it takes for a family to cut someone out so completely that they take scissors to the evidence he ever existed.

And she thought about Tommy, whispering to the dark, and she wondered — with a cold feeling spreading through her stomach — who exactly he’d been talking to.