you tell me there’s another secret relative, I’m leaving.”
She smiled.
“No.”
Then her expression softened.
“It’s about the first day you came to clean my house.”
I waited.
“You remember?”
“Of course.”
I remembered being nervous.
Thirty-one years old.
Exhausted.
Trying to build a schedule of clients after Daniel left.
Margaret had shown me the supplies, the rooms, the alarm system.
Nothing extraordinary.
“You had Willa with you,” Margaret said.
“For ten minutes.
My sister was late picking her up.”
“She sat at my kitchen table.”
I nodded.
“She drew me a picture.”
I frowned.
I didn’t remember that.
Margaret stood and went to a drawer.
From it, she removed a folded sheet of paper.
The page had yellowed.
A child’s drawing.
Three stick figures standing beside a house.
One tall.
One small.
One older woman with gray scribbled hair.
Across the top, in nine-year-old Willa’s uneven handwriting, were
