She closed the drawer and felt her face catch fire. Her hands shook a little while she tried to concentrate on her dusting. If anyone knew, she would be fired. She would have to be fired.

 What had happened to this family? Why was the only picture in evidence hidden in a drawer?

 Then, later, as she pushed the vacuum around the room, she realized something significant—it was the father’s drawer. How strange that seemed. She could envision the father demanding all the pictures be removed and the mother clinging to one. But it was the father holding on...and the mother’s assistant was buying Bethany clothes.

 Emma knew without even thinking about it that the next time they cleaned, the next time she had vacuuming and dusting, she would look in the mother’s drawer. Look for a picture.

 Then she thought of her stepmother. Rosemary dispensed with Emma’s father’s personal effects quickly, and the pictures soon followed because less than a year after his death Rosemary remarried. Emma kept pictures, however. So had her little sister, Lauren.

 The next house was a filthy mess. It took too much of their time but it removed all that conjecture about Bethany and her family from Emma’s mind for a while.

 * * *

 Makenna left them for a while to go with Nick and check a few crews. The next house wasn’t bad, but messier than usual. The lady of the house was at home because her arm was in a sling. “Fell and dislocated my shoulder and might’ve injured my rotator cuff, but I had X-rays and it will be fine,” she explained. “I’m just resting it and the doctor said to keep in immobilized for a few days.” Then she laughed and said, “I could have gone to work, I just can’t fix my hair with one arm!”

 Then she stayed out of the way. When they were finished and back in the van, they took a break to eat a little lunch. “Fell my fine ass,” Shawna said. “That’s about her fifth fall this year!”

 Emma almost choked on her drink. So—that was one of the households they knew too much about.

 “It’s possible she’s clumsy,” Emma said. “Isn’t it?”

 “Humph,” was the answer. “She’s being kicked around. Know how I know? Because I see it in her eyes and I’ve seen it before. When I looked in the mirror.”

 “Oh, dear God, Shawna,” Emma said.

 “Don’t waste pity on me—I found the way out, even if you never get all the way out. If he isn’t still out there posing a threat then he’s in here,” she said, tapping her head.

 “Don’t you worry none about Shawna,” Dellie said. “Her boys are as big as he is and they take good care of their mama.”

 “They do. Now we’re gonna get over to Ms. Fletcher’s... She’s the clumsy one.”

 “I think I might know what makes her so clumsy,” Dellie said. Then the two of them cackled madly.

 “What?” Emma asked.

 “She’s a wino,” Shawna said. And they giggled some more.

 It had taken her a while, but now Emma figured it out—she was hearing all this gossip because Makenna wasn’t with them. Makenna was part of the executive trio with Riley and Nick, the holders of the holy grail, the policy manual. Violation of the policies got you fired.

 “What’s up with the Christensen house?” Emma bravely asked.

 Shawna shrugged. “Career couple.”

 “Someone’s got a little OCD going on there. I vote for her.”

 “Could be him,” Dellie said. “We wouldn’t know, they’re never home. It’s an easy house.”

 “Not a speck of dust anywhere.”

 “You gotta wonder why they hired a cleaning crew,” Shawna said.

 “For the carpet tracks,” Dellie said.

 “You gotta wonder why they had a kid,” Emma ventured.

 “Yeah, poor kid. Typical.”

 “Typical?”

 “All they think about is work and money. Everything has to be perfect,” Dellie said.

 “I like it that way better than the Brewsters—those boys have every toy and gadget ever invented, they’re sloppy, with no manners or respect and—” Shawna said.

 “And I bet they already got accepted to Harvard even though the oldest one is twelve.”

 “That is a hard house,” Emma agreed. Dirty, messy, cluttered with stuff. If she’d had a child, she would have taught him to put away his things, even if they had household help. When she dumped the trash in the master bath it was full of the lady’s outrageous price tags. She smiled to herself. Those numbers hadn’t always seemed outrageous to her.

 How many of her cleaning staff saw her price tags? Well, hardly any of her things had price tags as they were designed specifically for her. But there was the odd outrageously expensive purse purchased at Neiman’s...

 She had an urge to unburden herself to her new friends, new friends who would never understand. She’d like to tell them what she knew—that those people with all their possessions could wake up one day to discover they’d been living a lie, that the identity they thought they had was gone and they would have to figure out all over again who they were.

 Of course she couldn’t. This was why she’d come back. There were a few people here who knew her before and after, who knew who she had been growing up and who she was again.

 Only Emma was having a hard time getting a fix on her identity.

 * * *

 Emma had a message on her cell phone from Aaron Justice so she called him back before leaving the parking lot after work.