"Your dryer's been broken since July," said a voice from the doorway.
All three of us turned.
Hesper Vandersloot was standing in my kitchen doorway, in leggings and an oversized Big Walnut Orchestra sweatshirt, with her hair, which was the same dark blonde her mother's used to be, in a braid over one shoulder. She was holding my son's hand. Not dramatically. Just holding it, the way you'd hold a railing on a staircase. Dashiell was behind her, in the T-shirt and plaid pajama pants he'd slept in, looking like a person who had been awake since five rehearsing a speech and had just watched the speech blow away in a high wind.
I had not heard anyone come in through my back door. Later I'd learn that Hesper had come through the gate at the back corner of our yard, the one that opens onto the strip of common grass behind the houses that the HOA maintains, that she'd walked along the outside of the fence in her socks and let herself in through the slider that Dashiell had unlocked for her. That she had been sitting with him on the back steps since seven, and that she'd seen her mother's car pull out of their driveway and turn onto Foxglove instead of toward Route 3, and had known exactly where it was going.
"Hesper," Ottoline said. Her voice did something I'd never heard it do. It went up, thin, like a kite string snapping. "Go home. Right now. Go home."
"The washer's been making that grinding sound since June," Hesper said, as if her mother hadn't spoken. Her voice shook, but she kept going. "And the dryer stopped heating in July. You said you'd call somebody. You didn't call anybody, because the guy from Sears said it was going to be eleven hundred dollars to replace them both and you said, Absolutely not, not this month, and then you said not next month, either. And you said we weren't going to the laundromat on Cherry Street, because Mrs. Quarrington from the board goes there on Saturdays and you'd rather die than have her see you hauling laundry baskets. So you've been washing things in the bathtub and hanging them in the basement on the drying rack, and the basement smells like mildew, and my orchestra blouse got a mildew spot on it, and I had to wear it at the fall concert with a spot on it."
"Hesper."
"So I've been doing our laundry at Dash's house," Hesper said. "Since August. Tuesday nights, when his mom works late. I put it in the big sack. He takes it over the fence because the gate on our side squeaks and you'd hear it. We do our homework at his kitchen table while it washes and dries. Then he hands it back over in the morning before you're up, and I fold it, and I put it away, and you think it dried in the basement." She took a breath. "That's what the footage is. That's all it is. I was the one holding the bag. You just can't see me because I was standing behind the fence."