She padded upstairs, IPA still in hand (don’t judge, she was an adult), and found Leo sitting up in bed, his hair a nest of static.
The babysitter lifestyle wasn’t about the stuff. It was about the silence. The clean, borrowed silence of a house where someone else paid the mortgage, and your only job was to keep a small, granola-bar-eating human alive.
But as she unlocked the door to her own shoebox apartment—the one with the flickering hallway light and the roommate who never did dishes—she realized the truth.