The first sign that the morning wasn’t going to be like any other day was that Ms. Sarah wasn't in the kitchen when Beth found her way there for breakfast.
Beth had come to structure her mornings around this fact the way sailors structured things around tides. Ms. Sarah was like a programmed robot, at the stove by seven with the particular domestic order of her presence organising the room before anyone else arrived in it. It was reliable in the way very few things in this house were reliable, and Beth realized that she had come to depend on it more than she'd intended.
So it was no surprise she felt almost unsettled by the woman’s absence. Thankfully, she had a fully operational, opinionated, two-year-old to keep her distracted.
The boy had opinions about which chair he wanted to sit i
