The Nanny She Hired

Priya Raman has everything she was told to want. A surgical practice. A restored Victorian. A husband who still opens her car door. A daughter she loves so much it frightens her. What she does not have is time. So she hires Wren. Wren is quiet, careful, perfect. She knows the baby's rhythms before Priya does. She folds laundry like an apology. She never asks for anything. Then the photographs in Wren's room turn out to be from a commune that burned down twenty years ago, and one of the children in them is Priya, age four, in a dress she has never seen. Priya hired a stranger to raise her daughter. The stranger came for a reason. And the reason is standing in the nursery, humming a lullaby Priya somehow already knows.