A few minutes later, I leaned in close to the screen, because there was someone in the nursery I was certain did not live in this house.
On the footage, at three in the morning, an old woman sat in the rocking chair beside the crib, rocking slowly, her lips moving in what looked like a song. I had never seen her before in my life. An unknown elderly woman in the baby room in the dead of night is the single most frightening thing a nanny can imagine, and I imagined all of it at once.
I nearly called the police before I called anyone. But something made me show the clip to the mother first, my hands unsteady, and instead of fear her face filled with a soft, sad wonder. She knew exactly who it was. It was her own mother, the grandmother of the baby, who had a key to the house and lived only two streets away.
The grandmother had been quietly slipping in at night for weeks. She was in the early days of losing her memory, the doctors had confirmed it, and the nights were when she got confused and restless and wandered. Her feet, out of a lifetime of habit, carried her to the one place that had always meant comfort, a room with a crib and a baby to sing to, the way she had once sung to her own daughter in the dark.
The stranger who had terrified me was a grandmother whose mind was slipping, returning in the night to the only thing love always remembers how to do.
In the morning the father made coffee and joked like always, not yet knowing what the camera had caught. I told them both, gently, together. There were tears, but there was relief in them too, because they had known something was wrong with her and had not been able to name it, and now they could.
They did not lock her out. They did the opposite. They had a proper lock and a soft alarm fitted so they would know the moment she arrived, not to keep her away but to keep her safe, and to go down and sit with her instead of letting her wander alone. A doctor got involved. A plan was made. The family closed in around her the way she had once closed in around all of them.
I did not pack my bag. Now, some nights, when I hear the front door and the slow shuffle toward the nursery, I go down and I find her in the rocking chair, singing to a great grandchild she cannot always place, and I sit with her until she is calm. She does not always know my name. But she knows the song, every word of it, and she knows that the baby is hers to love, and honestly, in this house, that has turned out to be more than enough.
