Fucking The Babysitter -

She laughed. This was the other part of the babysitter lifestyle—the bizarre, late-night negotiations with small philosophers. She got him a granola bar. He ate it in bed, crumbs falling like snow onto his dinosaur pillowcase. She read him one page of a picture book before he passed back out, face-first into the mattress.

At 11:45 PM, the Harts came home, flushed with champagne and good gossip. Mrs. Hartwell pressed an extra fifty into Chloe’s hand. “You’re a lifesaver. Leo didn’t wake up, did he?” fucking the babysitter

“It’s 9:30.”

Chloe’s friends worked retail. They folded jeans under fluorescent lights. Chloe, on the other hand, was a professional loiterer in other people’s better lives. She laughed

Tonight was a Level Three gig. Level One was standard: pizza, Disney+, kids in bed by nine, mindless scrolling on her own cracked phone. Level Two was the sweet spot: kids asleep early, access to the good snacks (the dark-chocolate-covered pretzels hidden behind the oat milk), and a movie she’d been dying to see. Level Three, however, was rare. Level Three was magic. He ate it in bed, crumbs falling like

She wandered into the primary bathroom—something she’d never admit to her mother. The heated floors clicked on as she stepped inside. She opened the medicine cabinet. Not to snoop for secrets, but to experience the aesthetic . Dr. Barbara Sturm serums lined up like little soldiers. A gua sha tool. A jade roller. Chloe took a deep breath, then dabbed a pea-sized amount of the $180 eye cream under her own tired, student-schedule eyes. It felt like cold butter on toast. Decadent. Wrong. Perfect.

The house on Cedar Lane had a rhythm Chloe could feel in her bones by now. The faint hum of the dehumidifier in the basement, the squeak of the third stair from the top, and the soft, desperate sigh of the Keurig at 10:17 PM—the exact moment Mrs. Hartwell finally stopped doomscrolling and went to bed.