How much can her employers see or control from a distance, while she is home alone with four children? How much that unnerves Rowan is simply paranoia? The parents are architects and made their abode a smart home in the extreme, with everything automated, regulated -and visible on camera. There’s a woman from the village who comes in to the house to do some cleaning and a man around Rowan’s age who tackles a variety of jobs and lives in a small apartment right behind the house. And that means there are precious few suspects: She had to take care of three young girls full time while the parents were away at a work convention, plus the older teen sister who came home from school later in the time she was nannying. But she insists she’s innocent of murder, and she’s afraid because she doesn’t know how that child ended up dead - someone else, very likely someone who was living in or near the house, is guilty. She admits to some errors and how they make her look more guilty.

She tells the whole story in a letter to a lawyer she has heard may be able to get her acquitted. Little does she know that her story will end much more badly than she could have imagined: with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder. But Rowan takes the job, sure it won’t be as bad as that. The mother who hires her warns her she’s had a difficult time keeping nannies to stay on past a few weeks, and some have hinted the house is haunted. When she happens across an ad online for a live-in nannying position for a family with four daughters, it seems too good to be true: high pay with almost no expenses, a room in a stately home in the starkly beautiful Scottish Highlands. Rowan has been working in child care for some time her current job is at a child care center.

Turn of the key book