The woman who cleaned our house for twelve years left one thing behind, and it wasn’t hers. It was taped underneath the drawer where we kept the takeout menus, and I found it while looking for a pen. It was an envelope with my daughter’s name on it, written in handwriting neither of us recognized. The date on it was four years ago, when my daughter was still in high school. She’s twenty-two now, lives in Chicago, and I still haven’t told her about it.
I called the cleaner, but she’d changed her number. Her sister answered and said she’d been waiting for someone from our family to call. I asked what she meant, and she said the envelope wasn’t supposed to be opened until my daughter was old enough to understand what it meant. I asked who had given it to her, but she wouldn’t say over the phone. Instead, she gave me an address and told me to come alone. She also said there was something else I needed to know before I went.
The address belonged to a small apartment building less than a mile from our old house. When I arrived, the cleaner was waiting outside with a box in her hands. She told me she’d found the envelope taped under the drawer after my daughter had come home from school one afternoon. She hadn’t put it there, but she knew exactly who had. Then she opened the box and showed me several photographs of my daughter as a teenager, taken from across the street. None of us had known anyone was photographing her.
I asked why she had kept them for four years. She said the person who gave them to her had promised to come back for them, but never did. Then she handed me the envelope and told me I could finally open it. Inside was a single photograph of my daughter standing beside a woman I didn’t recognize. On the back was a date from four years ago and a sentence written in the same handwriting as the envelope. It said, “She deserves to know who was watching her, but not until you know why.”:::
