A few minutes later, I set my bag back down by the door.
I had watched the footage three more times in the bathroom with the fan running so no one would hear, and each time I understood a little more of what I was actually looking at. At three in the morning the door of the nursery had opened, and the father came in alone, and he knelt down beside the crib in the dark and stayed there for almost an hour.
He was talking. That was the part that had frightened me, the low steady murmur for an hour in the middle of the night. But the camera has sound, and once I turned the volume all the way up, I could hear the words. He was talking to a second baby. One who was not there.
I did not understand until I asked the mother, very carefully, the next afternoon, whether the little one had ever had a sibling. She went quiet, and then she told me. The baby I care for was a twin. The other child, a boy, had died two days after they were born. They almost never speak of it. She did not know her husband went into the nursery at night at all.
On the recording he was telling the brother who did not make it about his day. About the little sister, how she had grabbed his finger, how she was going to be strong enough for the both of them. He promised the boy he would never let this one out of his sight. Then he pressed his hand to the empty side of the crib and went back to bed.
I had been ready to run from a man who was doing nothing but grieving in the only hour of the day when no one could see him be weak.
In the morning he made coffee and joked like always, not knowing the camera had recorded all night, not knowing I had seen the softest and most broken part of him. I smiled back. And a few minutes later I did the only decent thing there was to do. I deleted that clip so it could stay his, and his alone.
I did not tell him I knew. Some grief is not meant to be walked in on. But I did start leaving the nursery door open a little wider at night, and I moved the second rocking chair back in beside the crib, the one the mother had quietly carried to the attic a year before.
He noticed the chair. He never asked who moved it. He just sat in it the next night, and the next, and I let him think the house had simply remembered the child it lost. I am still their nanny. I think I will be for a long time.
