The babysitter texted: the kids are asleep, everything's fine. We don't have kids.

My wife read it out loud twice. We were forty minutes into a movie on our couch.

There is no upstairs in our house.

I called the number. A young woman answered in a whisper, annoyed — the way you sound when someone interrupts a job you're doing well.

"They just went down," she said. "You don't have to check on me every hour."

I asked for the address. She read it back: our house number, our street, the misspelling the post office has never fixed.

My wife grabbed my arm.

Then the babysitter said, "Hold on, one of them's awake," and I heard small footsteps directly above our heads — in a house that only has one floor.