And exactly how she liked the cushions arranged on the living-room sofa.
To her, I always assumed I was simply Carly.
The woman who arrived every Thursday at nine and left before two.
Mrs. Whitaker had always treated me well.
She paid on time.
She kept the house comfortable while I worked.
She remembered to ask about my daughter.
But we weren’t exactly friends.
We didn’t call each other during the week.
We never met for coffee.
I had a key to her front door, yet I still felt awkward taking a glass from her kitchen without asking.
When I first started working for Mrs. Whitaker, my daughter Willa was only nine.
I had recently separated from her father and was taking every cleaning job I could squeeze between school drop-off and pickup.
Money was tight.
Some weeks, frighteningly tight.
Mrs. Whitaker had found one of the handwritten flyers I posted around town and called me.
What started as just another cleaning job quickly became the most dependable part of my week.
Every Thursday.
Same time.
Same house.
For eight years.
Then, a few weeks ago, Mrs. Whitaker told me she was moving closer to her daughter.
“I’m tired of paying for an upstairs I barely use,” she joked.
I laughed with her.
But when the final Thursday arrived, the house felt strangely unfamiliar.
Most of the rooms were nearly empty.
Pale rectangles marked the walls where family photographs had hung for years.
The calendar beside the refrigerator was gone.
Half the cabinets had already been cleared.
Several times, I reached automatically for familiar objects before remembering they had already been packed away.
When I finished cleaning, I gathered my supplies and walked over to Mrs. Whitaker.
Then I held out her house key.
