She stood to greet them, her report about Tommy’s peaceful evening ready on her lips. But as Sabrina slipped off her coat, her eyes swept the room with that same assessing look from earlier, and she paused. “Was everything quiet?” she asked, her tone neutral.
“Perfectly,” Kayla said, perhaps too quickly. She decided against mentioning the sound or the door. It seemed silly now, with the lights bright and the parents home.
Mark paid her with a generous bonus for the short notice, and Sabrina offered a thin, formal smile as she saw her out. “Thank you for your help,” she said, her hand already on the door.
Walking to her car, Kayla shook off the lingering chill. It was just a new house, strange noises, an unlocked door. Nothing more. But as she drove away, she glanced back at the upstairs window. For a second, she thought she saw a curtain twitch, falling back into place. She blinked, and it was still. Just a trick of the light, she told herself firmly, and focused on the road ahead.
The unease that had flooded through her so quickly she almost laughed at its intensity began to recede as Mark and Sabrina stepped inside. They were chatting casually about their workday, their voices filling the house with a mundane normalcy that instantly made her earlier fear feel… exaggerated and silly.
Kayla opened her mouth, the words about the back door and the sound upstairs poised on her tongue, but then she stopped. Tommy was reaching for his mother sleepily, Mark was smiling as he shrugged off his coat, and the house around them looked warm and safe in the evening light. Bringing it up suddenly felt dramatic, like she was making something out of nothing. *Maybe I simply forgot to lock the door,* she reasoned. *Maybe the sound was just the old HVAC system groaning to life or a pipe shifting in the walls. Maybe it was all just first-day nerves.* So she kept quiet, swallowing the words down. But the unease didn’t truly leave her. It just settled deeper, a cold, quiet weight in her stomach.
Over the next week, Kayla tried diligently to convince herself she’d imagined the entire back door incident. It was her first day, nerves were perfectly normal, and the house was probably just older and noisier than it looked. Still, every time she climbed the stairs alone to grab a toy or a change of clothes for Tommy, she felt a familiar, quiet tension settle between her shoulder blades.
The first odd moment that truly challenged her rationalizations happened on a Wednesday afternoon. Tommy had asked for his favorite crackers, and Sabrina, busy on a work call, had told Kayla they were kept in the upstairs pantry, the narrow closet next to the linen closet. Kayla headed up, humming a soft, tuneless melody to herself to keep the atmosphere calm. But halfway down the hall, she stopped dead. A soft, distinct creak echoed behind her—quick, subtle, like a foot carefully shifting its weight on a floorboard.