The Turn of the Key

“It’s not that though.” He got up and came around the breakfast bar to my side of it, sitting on the gleaming chrome stool facing me, his legs spread wide so that I couldn’t easily move without rubbing his thigh. “No, it’s not that. I definitely feel like we’ve met. Who did you say you worked for before this?”

I rattled off the list again, and he shook his head, dissatisfied.

“I don’t know any of them. Maybe I’m imagining it. I feel like I’d remember a face . . . well, a face like yours.”

Fuck. Something twisted in the pit of my stomach. I had been in this situation too often not to recognize where this was heading. My first job out of school, a young waitress with a boss who dangled a pay raise and complimented me on my fuchsia-pink bra. Countless creeps on countless nights out, putting themselves between me and the door. Randy dads at the nursery, angling for sympathy about their postpartum wives who didn’t understand them . . .

Bill was one of them.

He was my employer. He was my boss’s husband. And worst of all, he was . . .

Jesus. I can’t bring myself to say it.

My hands had begun to shake, and I clenched my fingers more tightly around the stem of my wineglass to try to hide it.

I cleared my throat and tried to push my stool back, but it was wedged against the edge of the breakfast bar. Bill’s meaty denim-clad thighs blocked my way, effectively preventing me from getting down.

“Well, I’d better be heading up.” My voice fluted slightly with nerves. “Early start tomorrow, right?”

“There’s no hurry,” he said, and he reached out and took the wineglass from my fingers, filled it up, and then put out his hand towards my face. “You’ve just . . . you’ve got a little bit . . .”

His smooth, slightly sweaty thumb stroked the corner of my bottom lip, and I felt one knee nudge, very gently, between mine.

For a second I froze, and a fluttering panicked nausea rose up, choking me. Then something inside me seemed to snap, and I slid abruptly down off the stool, barging past him so fast that the wine slopped and spilled onto the concrete.

“Sorry,” I stammered. “So sorry, let me, I’ll get a cloth—”

“It’s fine,” he said. He was not one iota discomfited, only amused at my reaction. He stayed in place, half sitting, half leaning comfortably against the barstool, as I grabbed a dishcloth and mopped at the floor between his legs.

For one second I looked up at him, and he looked down, and the quip I’d heard a thousand times, always accompanied by ribald laughter, flashed through the back of my mind. While you’re down there, love . . .

I stood up, my face burning, and dumped the wine-stained cloth into the sink.

“Good night, Bill,” I said abruptly, and I turned on my heel.

“Good night, Rowan.”

And I walked up the two flights of stairs to bed, not looking back.

As I shut the door of my new room behind me, I felt a sense of overwhelming relief. I’d unpacked earlier, and even though the room didn’t feel like home yet, it did have a sense of being a little corner of the house that was my own territory, somewhere I could spread out, stop acting a part, stop being Rowan the Perfect Nanny and just be . . . me.

I pulled the elastic band out of my tight, perky ponytail and felt my thick wiry hair spring out into a crown around my head and the polite, people-pleasing smile that I’d had plastered on my face since I’d arrived relax into a weary neutrality. As I stripped off the buttoned-up cardigan, blouse, and tweed skirt I felt like I was shedding layers of pretense, back to the girl I was behind the facade—the one who wore pajamas until bedtime at the weekends, who lay on the sofa not reading a self-help book, but mainlining Judge Judy. The one who would have called Bill a fucking pig instead of standing there, paralyzed into politeness, before offering to wipe up after herself.

The intricacies of the control panels were a welcome distraction from having to think about that part of things, and by the time I’d wrested control of the temperature down to something more reasonable and remembered how to work the shower, my heart was thumping less and I was talking myself round into an acceptance of the situation.

Okay, so Bill was a creep. He wasn’t the first I’d encountered. Why was I so disappointed to find him here?

I knew the answer, of course. But it wasn’t just who he was. It was everything he represented—all the hard work and careful planning that had brought me here, all the hopes and dreams bound up with my decision to apply. That feeling that for once in my life something was going right, falling into place. The whole situation had seemed perfect—too perfect, perhaps. There had to be a fly in the ointment, and maybe Bill was it.

Suddenly the supernatural stuff didn’t seem so mysterious after all. Not a poltergeist. Just your average fiftysomething man who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. The same old, boring, depressing story.

Still, it felt like a kick in the guts.

It wasn’t until I had finished showering and had done my teeth, and was lying in bed, that I looked up at the ceiling. At the recessed light fittings, and the little blinking smoke alarm by the door, and . . . something else in the corner over there. What was that? A burglar alarm sensor? A second smoke detector?

Or was it . . .

I thought of Sandra’s remark at my interview: The whole house is wired up . . .