The one thing it didn’t cover was total disappearance—or at least, if it did, I couldn’t find the page where it was mentioned, but as I skimmed down the carefully annotated “typical weekend day,” I saw that Petra was overdue for lunch, which might explain her irritability. I didn’t really want to start preparing food before I’d tracked down Maddie and Ellie, but at least I could give Petra a snack to tide her over and stop her grumbling.

6:00, the page began. All the younger ones (but particularly Ellie) are prone to early wakings. To that end, we have installed the sleep-training “Happy bunny clock” in the girls’ room. It’s a digital clock with a screen image of a sleeping bunny that soundlessly switches over to an image of a wide-awake “Happy bunny” at 6:00 a.m. If Ellie wakes before this, please gently (!) encourage her to check the clock and get back into bed if the bunny is still asleep. Obviously use your judgment regarding nightmares and toilet accidents.

Jesus. Was there nothing in this house that wasn’t controlled by the bloody app? I scanned the page, skipping past suggested outfits and wet-weather clothes, and acceptable breakfast menus, down to midmorning.

10:30–11:15—snack, e.g., some fruit (bananas, blueberries, grapes—QUARTERED for Petra, please), raisins (sparingly only—teeth!), breadsticks, rice cakes, or cucumber sticks. No strawberries (Ellie is allergic), no whole nuts (nut butters are okay, but we only buy the sugar-/salt-free kind), and finally Petra is not allowed snacks containing refined sugar or excess salt (older girls are allowed sugar in moderation). This can be hard to police if you are out, so in that scenario I suggest taking a snack box.

Well, at least the app didn’t prepare the snacks. Still, I’d never encountered anything like this level of detail at any other nannying job—at Little Nippers the staff handbook was a slim pamphlet that concentrated mostly on how to report staff sickness. Rules, yes. Screen time, sanctions, red lines, allergies—all of that was normal. But this—did she think I had spent nearly ten years in childcare without knowing you had to cut up grapes?

As I closed the scarlet folder and pushed it away from me across the table, I wondered. Was it the unsettling changes of staff that had made Sandra so controlling? Or was she just a woman desperately trying to be there for her family, even when she couldn’t be physically present? Bill, it was clear, felt no compunction about leaving his children alone with a comparative stranger, however well qualified. But Sandra’s binder spoke of a very different type of parent—one very conflicted about the situation she was in. Which begged the question of why, in that case, she was so determined to be with Bill rather than at home. Was it really just professional pride? Or was there something else going on?

There was a huge marble fruit bowl in the center of the concrete table, freshly stocked with oranges, apples, satsumas, and bananas, and with a sigh, I ripped a banana off the bunch, peeled it, and placed a few chunks on Petra’s tray. Then I went into the playroom to see if Maddie had returned. She wasn’t there, nor was she in the living room, or anywhere in the house, as far as I could tell. At last I went to the utility room door, the one she had left by, and called out into the woods.

“Maddie! Ellie! Petra and I are having ice cream.” I paused, listening for the sound of running feet, cracking branches. Nothing came. “With sprinkles.” I had no actual idea if there were sprinkles but at this point I didn’t care about false advertising, I just wanted to know where they both were.

More silence, just the sound of birds. The sun had gone in, leaving the air surprisingly chilly, and I shivered, feeling the goose bumps rise on my bare arms. Suddenly hot chocolate seemed more appropriate than ice cream, in spite of the fact that it was June.

“Okay!” I called again, more loudly this time. “More sprinkles for me!”

And I walked back into the house, leaving the side door open a crack.

In the kitchen I did a double take.

Petra was standing up in her high chair on the far side of the breakfast bar, triumphantly waving a chunk of banana at me.

“Fuck!”

For a moment all feeling drained out of me, and I stood, frozen to the spot, looking at her precarious stance, the unforgiving concrete beneath her, her small wobbly feet on the slippery wood.

And then, regaining my senses, I ran, stumbling over a stray teddy, staggering around the corner of the breakfast bar to snatch her up, my heart in my mouth.

“Oh my God, Petra, you bad, bad girl. You mustn’t do that. Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

She could have died—that was the long and short of it. If she’d fallen and struck her head on the concrete floor, she would have been concussed before I could reach her.

How could I have been so stupid?

I’d supervised toddlers a million times before—I’d done all the right things, pulled her chair away from the counter so she couldn’t push herself backwards with her feet, and I was sure, certain in fact, that I’d done up those clips. They were far too stiff for little fingers.

So how had she got free?

Had she wriggled out?

I examined the clips. One side was still fastened. The other was open. Shit. I must have not pushed one home quite hard enough, and Petra had worked it loose and then managed to squirm out of the other side of the restraint.

So it was my fault after all. The thought made my hands feel cold with fear, and my cheeks feel hot with shame. Thank God it hadn’t happened when Sandra was here. That kind of safeguarding stuff was pretty much nannying 101. She would have been within her rights to sack me there and then.

Though, of course . . . she still could, if she was watching over the cameras. In spite of myself, my eyes flicked up to the ceiling, and sure enough there was one of those little white egg-shaped domes in the far corner of the room. I felt my face flush and looked away hastily, imagining Sandra seeing my guilty reaction.

Fuck. Fuck.

Well, there was nothing I could do, apart from hope that Sandra and Bill had better things to do than pore over the footage of their security cameras every hour of the day and night. I was pretty confident that Bill hadn’t so much as glanced at the app since leaving, but Sandra . . . somehow that binder spoke of a level of intensity that I had not quite anticipated from her relaxed, cheerful manner at the interview.

But with any luck they would be in a mobile black spot, or even in the air by now. Did the footage record? How long was it stored for? I didn’t know, and somehow I doubted whether that information was in the binder.

The realization was unsettling. I could be being watched, right now.

It was with a strange performative feeling that I hugged Petra tightly to my chest and dropped a shaky kiss on the top of her head. Beneath my lips I felt the gentle flex of her fontanelle, the fragility of a baby-soft skull almost, but not quite, closed over.

“Don’t do that again,” I told her, firmly, feeling the adrenaline still pulsing through me, and then, with an effort at restoring normality, I lifted her up and took her over to the sink, where I wiped her face. Then I looked at my watch, trying to breathe slowly and normally, and remember what I had been doing before Petra scared the life out of me.

It was just gone one. The binder had said Petra ate lunch twelve thirty to one and then went down for a nap at two. But in spite of that, she was grousing and rubbing her eyes crossly, and I found myself mentally adding up timings and trying to figure out how to handle this. At the nursery they’d gone down straight after lunch more or less, around one.