Finding a babysitter for our five-year-old daughter shouldn’t have been this difficult.
Every nanny we hired came through the same highly rated agency.
They all had excellent references and glowing reviews.
Yet the first lasted only three days.
The second quit before the end of her first week.
The third called me in tears halfway through a shift.
And every single one gave us almost the exact same explanation.
“I’m sorry… I just can’t do this.”
But whenever I asked what had happened, they refused to say another word.
It made no sense.
We paid well.
Our daughter, Sophie, was sweet, polite, and easy to look after.
We even had security cameras throughout the common areas of our house, and nothing on the recordings ever seemed unusual.
Still…
one babysitter after another disappeared from our lives.
After the seventh one quit, my husband finally joked:
“Maybe I should apply.”
I laughed.
Then I suddenly stopped.
“What if you actually did?”
A week later, wearing a wig and glasses and using the name “Megan,” my husband responded to one of the agency’s online ads.
To our surprise…
they hired him.
Not to work for us.
For another family.
We agreed he’d stay there as long as he could and tell me about anything that seemed strange.
For the first few days, everything appeared completely normal.
The agency’s office was spotless.
The employees were friendly.
Every nanny signed the same paperwork.
Every family seemed perfectly ordinary.
Then, on his fifth day, something finally happened.
Just as he was about to leave, the agency director stopped him in the hallway.
She smiled.
“We need you to deliver one last package before you go home.”
Then her expression became strangely serious.
“No questions,” she said.
“Just leave it on the doorstep and walk away.”
My husband looked down at the address.
It wasn’t the home where he’d been working.
It wasn’t even in the same neighborhood.
He recognized it.
The address belonged to one of the babysitters who had abruptly quit working for us months earlier.
He was supposed to drive there, leave the envelope, and walk away.
Instead, he pulled into an empty parking lot…
locked the doors…
and secretly opened it.
PART 2
Eric’s voice on the phone was low and flat, the way it gets when he’s trying not to shake.
“Anna, I opened it. There’s six hundred dollars in cash in here, in twenties. And there’s a typed letter.”
I was sitting at our kitchen table, with Sophie’s half-finished drawing of a purple giraffe in front of me, and my hand gripped so tightly around the phone that my fingers had gone white. It was a quarter to six. Sophie was in the next room, humming to herself, arranging her stuffed animals along the couch.
“Read it to me,” I said.
I heard the crackle of paper.
“‘Dear Ms. Callahan. Thank you for ending your placement with the Reyes family. Per Section 14(b) of your Agency Agreement, your early termination bonus is enclosed. Your confidentiality obligations remain in force. Any disclosure to the family, or to any third party, will result in forfeiture of your references and may expose you to legal action. We appreciate your discretion. — V. Hale, Director.'”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Brooke Callahan,” I said. It was the name of the first nanny. The one who had lasted three days.
“There’s a second page.” Eric’s voice cracked. “It’s a ledger. It lists families, in a column. Placement dates. Termination dates. And a column on the right, ‘Replacement Fees Collected.'” He drew a ragged breath. “We’re on it, Anna. Reyes. Seven rows. Three thousand, five hundred dollars a row.”
“Twenty-four thousand five hundred,” I whispered.
“There are forty other families.”
I closed my eyes.
I thought of the seven women who had come through our front door. Kind faces, tired eyes, sensible shoes. Brooke, in her blue cardigan, with her hair in a braid, who had read Sophie Goodnight Moon three times in a row. Marguerite, who had taught her to knit. Dolores, who had cried on the telephone, and said, I’m sorry, Mrs. Reyes, I just can’t do this, and then, quietly, as if she had been caught, hung up.
“They were paid to quit,” I said.
“They were told to,” said Eric. “By the agency. It’s in the contract.” His voice shook. “Every time a nanny quits within a week, the family has to buy a replacement placement. That’s the fee. The whole thing’s a — it’s a churn. A machine for making families pay again.”
Through the open doorway, I heard Sophie singing.
“I’m going to take it to her,” said Eric. “To Brooke. I’m going to ask her.”
“Eric. It’s dangerous.”
“I’m wearing a wig and a pair of reading glasses, Anna.” A shaky laugh. “Nobody is going to recognize me.”
He did not deliver the envelope to the doorstep. Instead, in his gray sedan, wearing his wig and a cardigan he’d bought at a thrift store, he drove across the city, and knocked on the front door of a small yellow house in a neighborhood I had never visited.
The door opened a crack.
A young woman’s face appeared in the gap. She was thirty, thin, with a long braid and enormous tired eyes. She looked at the wig, the glasses, the cardigan.
“Is this from them?” she whispered.
PART 3
Brooke Callahan let him in.
She did not say much at first. She stood in her small, bare living room, in a faded blue cardigan, holding the envelope in both hands, as if it were something hot. A threadbare couch. A folding table. A stack of unopened bills on the counter. A child’s drawing, taped to the refrigerator, of a stick-figure woman and a very large sun.
“I’m not Megan,” said Eric. He took off the glasses. He lifted the wig, awkwardly, in both hands, like a man removing a hat. “My name is Eric Reyes. My daughter’s name is Sophie. You were her nanny for three days last March.”
Brooke stared at him.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. Her face crumpled. “Oh, Mr. Reyes. I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I wanted to tell you. I swear to God.” She pressed the envelope against her chest. “Your wife. She called me, twice. I couldn’t say anything. They’d told me what would happen.”
“What did they tell you?”
She sat down, heavily, on the arm of the couch, with her braid over her shoulder.
“I have a daughter,” said Brooke. “She’s six. Her father’s not in the picture. I was two months behind on rent when I signed with Sterling. They said they’d place me with wonderful families. And they did. Yours was the nicest I’d ever worked for.” Her voice cracked. “Sophie is a sweet kid.”
“Then why did you quit?”
“On the third day, at lunch, my phone rang,” she said. “It was Ms. Hale. The director. She said, ‘Brooke, we have a situation. We need you to resign from the Reyes placement, effective today.’ I said, ‘Why? I haven’t done anything.’ She said, ‘It’s in your agreement, Section 14(b). You agreed to terminate on request.'” She wiped her eyes. “I’d signed forty pages. I hadn’t read them. She said if I refused, they’d report me for ‘breach of contract,’ and I’d lose my references, and my license. And if I did what they asked, I’d get a bonus. Five hundred dollars. For doing nothing.”
“And you needed it.”
“I needed it so badly.” She was crying openly now. “I’d already sold my car. I was behind on groceries. I thought, just this once. It would give me a month.” She wiped her face on her sleeve. “And then it was the second family. And the third. I kept thinking I’d stop. And I couldn’t.”
I was listening through Eric’s phone, which he had left, on speaker, on the arm of her couch. I heard her small, ragged breath. I heard something tight and aching move inside my own chest.
“How many?” asked Eric.
“Eleven families,” said Brooke. “In fourteen months.”
“How many nannies?”
“Thirty, maybe more.” She looked up. “I know three personally. We have a group chat. Nobody talks. Nobody can. But we all say the same thing to the families.” Her voice broke. “‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do this.’ It’s the script.”
“The script,” Eric repeated.
“We’re not supposed to say anything else.”
Quietly, in the thin gray light of a stranger’s living room, my husband, wearing a cardigan and holding a wig, reached across a folding table and took a young woman’s hand.
“Brooke,” he said. “Would you be willing to tell someone? Not me. A lawyer. An investigator. Someone who can actually do something.”
She stared at him.
“They’ll ruin me.”
“They won’t,” said Eric. “I promise you they won’t.”
PART 4
We hired a lawyer on Monday.
Her name was Judith Adler, a silver-haired woman in her fifties, with half-moon glasses, a navy suit, and the dry, unflappable manner of someone who has spent thirty years watching people lie. She listened to the whole story in her small, cluttered office above a bakery, with a mug of black coffee at her elbow, and said nothing until Eric had finished.
“You understand what this is,” she said.
“A scam.”
“A scheme to defraud consumers. And a kind of coerced labor arrangement.” She tapped the ledger with one finger. “I’ve seen cases like this in the home-care industry. But I’ve never seen one so tidy.” She looked up. “I’d like to call the Attorney General’s consumer protection division. But I’ll need more than a ledger. I’ll need evidence from the inside. The director’s own words.”
Eric and I looked at each other.
“I can go back,” said Eric.
“It would be risky.”
“I’m already in the building.”
I did not want him to. I said so, in the car, afterward, with my hands pressed against my eyes. But I knew, even as I said it, what he would answer.
“Seven women, Anna,” he said, softly. “Seven. Think of Brooke.”
On Thursday, wearing a fresh wig, a gray cardigan, and a tiny wireless microphone taped beneath his collar, Eric walked into the immaculate, blue-carpeted lobby of Sterling Home Care Placement for the fifth time. The receptionist smiled. The air smelled of lavender and floor polish.
At ten past four, the director summoned him to her office.
Vivian Hale was fifty, sleek, silver-bobbed, in a cream silk blouse and pearls. She sat behind a glass-topped desk, with a bowl of fresh peonies at her elbow, and she smiled at him as though he were a favored niece.
“Megan,” she said. “I’ve been very pleased with your work.”
“Thank you, Ms. Hale.”
“I have an opportunity for you.” She slid a folder across the desk. “In ten days, a family named Reyes will receive a call from you, resigning your placement. I’ll need you to say, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do this.'”
Eric did not move.
“I’m sorry?” he said, in a high, careful falsetto.
“It’s quite simple. You’ll receive a bonus of six hundred dollars. You won’t be asked to do anything else.” She tilted her head. “You’ve been so reliable.”
He was recording. I knew it. Back in Judith Adler’s office, with a pair of headphones clamped over my ears, I heard every word, every breath, every faint creak of her expensive chair.
“And if I don’t?” said Eric.
There was a small, charged silence.
“Megan,” said Vivian Hale, very softly. “I’d like you to look at me.”
He looked up.
“I know who you are, Mr. Reyes,” she said.
My heart stopped.
On the desk between them, she laid a single photograph. It was a picture of Sophie, in her yellow raincoat, standing at the end of our driveway, holding her purple giraffe.
PART 5
I don’t remember tearing off the headphones.
I remember Judith Adler’s hand on my shoulder. I remember a voice saying, Anna. Anna. Breathe. I remember the dry, gentle click of a phone being dialed, and Judith, in a low, level voice, saying, “This is Adler. Now. Go.”
Inside Vivian Hale’s office, my husband had risen from his chair.
“I know,” he said. His voice, without the falsetto, was low and quiet and steady. “And I’d like to tell you something, Ms. Hale.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’ve sent a photograph of my daughter to a man you believed was an employee.” He drew a breath. “You’ve threatened a child. On tape.”
For the first time, Vivian Hale’s smooth, composed face moved.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m wearing a microphone,” said Eric. “Under my collar. It’s been recording since four-oh-two. And the people listening to it, Ms. Hale, are not my wife.”
The door opened.
It was not loud. A quiet click of the latch, and two people stood in the doorway: a tall, broad-shouldered man in a gray suit, with a gold badge on his belt, and a small, severe woman in a navy blazer, with a leather folder. Behind them, in the corridor, I could see four more, in dark windbreakers with white letters across the back.
OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL.
“Vivian Hale?” said the man. His voice was calm and courteous. “I’m Investigator Cho. I have a warrant to search these premises, and to seize records in connection with a fraud investigation.” A pause. “I’d ask you to remain seated.”
She did not move. She sat behind her glass-topped desk, with the bowl of peonies at her elbow, and, very slowly, her hand dropped from the photograph.
It took eleven months.
I won’t describe it all. The press called it the Nanny Churn. The agency’s records, seized that afternoon, ran to eighty-four thousand pages. The Attorney General’s office identified one hundred and sixty-two families, and ninety-seven nannies, in four states. Vivian Hale was charged with racketeering, fraud, and extortion. She pleaded guilty in the spring and was sentenced to nine years.
The families were repaid in full, with interest. The nannies, every one, were granted immunity, and their references were restored, and, because Judith Adler was Judith Adler, a hardship fund of four hundred thousand dollars was established for those who had lost their homes.
Brooke Callahan wrote me a letter in June.
I don’t know how to thank you, it said, in careful, looping script. Because of you, I got my license back. I’m working at a daycare now. I got a raise. My daughter drew you a picture.
It was a stick figure in a yellow raincoat, and a very large sun.
We interviewed three candidates in July. Sophie sat in the middle of the living-room floor, with her purple giraffe in her lap, and asked each of them the same question: “Do you like to knit?”
The third, a calm, broad-faced woman in her fifties, with silver hair and a patchwork scarf, said, “I do. Would you like to learn?”
Sophie nodded, solemnly.
We hired Marguerite the next day. She was the second nanny. The one who had taught Sophie to knit.
On Sophie’s sixth birthday, in September, my husband walked into the backyard, in front of fourteen kindergarteners and a table of lopsided cupcakes, wearing a long brown wig, a pair of cat-eye glasses, and an enormous, unapologetic grin.
“Hello, children,” said Eric, in his best falsetto. “My name is Megan.”
Sophie stared.
“Daddy,” she said, with huge, solemn eyes. “Why do you look like a lady?”
The entire backyard erupted.
I laughed until I cried. Marguerite, standing at the cake table, had her hand pressed against her mouth. Eric took a bow, with his wig askew, and a paper crown over one ear.
And I thought, for the hundredth time, of the seven women who had said, I’m sorry, I just can’t do this, and of the one man, in a thrift-store cardigan, who had said, instead, I’ll try.
