Chapter 1: "It Was Like That When You Left."
"It Was Like That When You Left." — Our Neighbor's 17-Year-Old Babysat Our Kids.
I Came Home to a House That Looked Like Forty People Had Been There, and Our Whole Street Swears It Was Silent.
My sister got married on Saturday.
We left the kids at two in the afternoon and got home at ten past four in the morning.
The headlights swung onto our drive and lit up the front lawn, and my husband stopped the car halfway in.
Cups on the grass.
Plates.
Bottles in the flowerbed.
A pizza box lying open by the front step and paper plates all the way down to the fence, and more of it around the side of the house where I couldn't see the end of it.
Our neighbor's daughter, Chloe, had been sitting with our kids since we walked out the door.
She's seventeen.
We've known her since she was in a car seat.
I put my key in the lock and the door swung before I turned it.
The hallway was covered.
Cups, plates, somebody's jacket, a paper crown from a burger place we don't eat at.
It went through the kitchen and straight out the back door, and the garden behind the house was worse than the front.
My daughter, Mia, was asleep on the living room sofa.
Six years old, still in her day clothes, curled up on her side in the middle of all of it.
Chloe was seated in the armchair by the window with her phone face down on the arm.
"Chloe.
WHAT is this?"
She glanced around the room like she was seeing it for the first time.
"I don't know what to tell you.
It was like that when you left."
"Chloe."
"I sat right here all night.
I didn't even look at my phone."
At half past six, I knocked on Dave's door.
They're eleven meters from our front window, and Dave is up at five every day of his life.
"Quiet as anything," he said.
"We'd have heard a car door."
I asked the woman across the street.
I asked the family on the corner.
I asked four houses in both directions, standing there in my dress from the wedding at seven in the morning…
Not one person heard a thing.
Not music, not shouting, not a single car.
Forty people don't come and go in silence.
Forty people don't leave a lawn like that without one neighbor on a whole street noticing.
I came back inside and stood in my own hallway and I couldn't make the TWO things fit.
My husband was in the kitchen holding the paper crown, turning it over.
"Hang on," he said.
"The living room CAMERA."
I'd forgotten it was there.
We only ever put it up for the dog.
I sat down at the kitchen table, opened the app, and scrolled BACK to two o'clock.
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What did that camera show?
May you like
And where was Mia while all of this was happening?
Comment "NEXT" if you want Part 2 — it's in the comments.
