Chapter 3
The next morning, I decided to play detective. The thought made me feel ridiculous – I was spying on my own house, for God's sake – but I needed to know what was really going on.
"I'm running to Whole Foods," I announced after breakfast, grabbing my purse and keys. "Need to pick up some organic baby food for Zoe."
Anya looked up from wiping down the counter. "Want me to come with you? I could use some fresh air."
"No, that's okay. You stay here with Zoe. I won't be long."
I made a show of backing out of the driveway, then circled around the block and parked behind our detached garage. From here, I had a perfect view of the living room through the baby monitor app on my phone. My hands were shaking as I opened the app.
This is insane, I thought, staring at the tiny screen. I'm literally hiding in my own garage, spying on my nanny.
But I couldn't stop myself from wondering about this space. Had they used it? My stomach churned as I imagined Anya pressed against my car – the same car I drove Zoe to pediatric appointments, the same Honda I'd saved for months to buy. The image made bile rise in my throat.
"This is my car," I whispered to the empty garage. "My car that I worked for, that I use to keep my daughter safe."
The baby monitor crackled, and I focused on the screen. Anya was in the living room, supposedly organizing Zoe's toys. But the way she was doing it – bending at the waist instead of squatting, arching her back more than necessary – it was like she was putting on a show.
And she kept checking the time on her phone.
She's waiting for Kieran's lunch break.
I sat there for twenty minutes, watching her perform this weird cleaning routine, until I couldn't take it anymore. I actually needed to go to Whole Foods now to make my story believable.
Walking through the baby food aisle, I was hit with a memory so vivid it stopped me in my tracks. Three months ago, Kieran and I had spent an hour in this same section, reading every label, comparing ingredients.
"Only the best for our little girl," he'd said, holding up an organic sweet potato puree. "I want her to have everything we didn't growing up."
We'd wandered through the store like any excited first-time parents, debating whether to get the fancy organic cotton onesies, arguing over which baby monitor system to buy. At the checkout, he'd wrapped his arms around me from behind and whispered, "I can't wait to be a dad. We're going to be such a good team."
A good team.
The irony was crushing. Here I was, buying baby food alone while he was probably rushing home for his lunch break to screw our nanny.
I grabbed a few jars of organic vegetables and headed home, my stomach twisted in knots.
Back in the garage, I sat in my car for a few minutes, trying to work up the courage to go inside. That's when I decided to tackle the laundry – something normal and domestic to keep my hands busy while my mind raced.
I was transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer when I saw it. Mixed in with our usual laundry was something that definitely didn't belong: a pair of black lace panties. Expensive ones. The kind I'd looked at online but couldn't justify buying because we were saving for Zoe's college fund.
The fabric was softer than anything in my lingerie drawer, and the cut was far more revealing than anything I'd worn since becoming a mom. These weren't the practical cotton underwear I'd been living in since the pregnancy.
"This isn't mine," I said out loud to the empty laundry room.
But it was in our washing machine. With our clothes. Which meant...
My hands started shaking again as I held the panties up to the light. They were the exact style I'd bookmarked on that lingerie website months ago, the ones Kieran had seen me looking at and said were "too expensive for underwear."
Apparently, they weren't too expensive when they were for someone else.
The worst part wasn't just finding them. It was realizing they'd been washed with other clothes from around the house. Including items I was pretty sure had come from Zoe's nursery basket.
Wait. I dropped the panties like they were on fire. The laundry basket I'd grabbed these clothes from – I'd collected them from multiple rooms this morning, including some towels from Zoe's room.
These clothes came from my daughter's room.