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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Toothbrush
Laura Decker had rules.
Not many. She was not a rigid person. She could sleep in any bed, adjust to any thermostat setting, and eat whatever was left in a stranger's pantry without developing an existential crisis about it. Eleven years of professional house sitting had sanded away most of her preferences until she was smooth and adaptable, like a river stone or a woman who had simply given up on having opinions about thread count.
But she had one rule. One sacred, non-negotiable, etched-in-stone rule.
Never share a job.
House sitting was a solo profession for a reason. You were the guardian, the steward, the temporary ghost who drifted through someone else's life, keeping their plants alive and their pipes from freezing, and then vanished before the owners returned to find a single hair on the sofa cushion. It was a delicate ecosystem. One sitter per house. One set of hands on the orchid mister. One person remembering that the cat ate at 6:15, not 6:00, because Mrs. Patterson's Persian had a circadian rhythm more precise than a Swiss watch and would yowl like it was being murdered if breakfast arrived even ninety seconds late.
Laura had earned her reputation the hard way.
She had watered rare plants in houses with panic rooms. She had fed cats named after Roman emperors—Tiberius, Caligula, and one deeply unpleasant tabby called Nero, who set fire to nothing but certainly looked like he wanted to. She had slept under security cameras that blinked red all night like judgmental little eyes. She had once spent three months in a glass house in Sedona owned by a wellness influencer who believed curtains were emotional clutter and had left Laura a laminated card of affirmations to read every morning while the entire neighborhood watched her eat cereal in her underwear.
She had handled a refrigerator in Malibu that sent her emails. Passive-aggressive emails. *Door open for 47 seconds. Are you okay?* She was not okay. She was looking for the mustard. But she handled it.
She had handled a Labradoodle in Scottsdale that had its own therapist, a woman named Dr. Kemp, who conducted weekly video sessions during which the dog sat on a yoga mat and Laura was instructed to "hold space" in the adjacent room.
She had handled a sourdough starter in Brooklyn that came with a six-page care manual and a name. Brenda. The starter was named Brenda.
Laura could handle rich people and their beautiful, deranged lives.
What she could not handle—what she would not handle—was another house sitter in her house.
Which is why, on a drizzly Tuesday in late September, when Laura pulled her Honda Civic into the circular driveway of the Byers mansion in Portland's West Hills, she felt the particular calm that comes from knowing you are about to have six months of solitude, a fat paycheck, and absolutely no one to answer to except a dog and some fish.
The Byers mansion was enormous. Not tastefully enormous, like a renovated farmhouse that happened to have twelve bedrooms. Aggressively enormous. It sat on two acres of manicured grounds and looked like someone had described Pacific Northwest luxury to an architect who had only ever designed Bond villain lairs. There were walls of glass, cantilevered decks, a water feature that appeared to flow directly through the living room, and a front door made of reclaimed wood that probably had its own origin story.
Laura checked her phone one last time. The contract was clear. Six months, all expenses paid. Watch the koi, the orchids, the sourdough starter (another one—rich people and their fermented pets), the smart security system, and one neurotic Weimaraner named Gary.
Gary. She liked dogs named Gary. It suggested the owner had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the absurd, which in Laura's experience was the same thing.
She grabbed her duffel bag—she traveled light, another professional necessity—and approached the front door. The lockbox code worked. The alarm code worked. The foyer smelled like cedar and money.
So far, perfect.
She dropped her bag in the entryway and did what she always did first: a walkthrough. Top to bottom, room by room, checking for anything the client hadn't mentioned. Leaky faucets. Weird smells. Taxidermy. (You'd be surprised. Or maybe you wouldn't.)
The kitchen was a cathedral of marble and brushed steel, with an island the size of a small country and a refrigerator that almost certainly had opinions. The living room had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the koi pond, which glittered in the gray afternoon light like a pool of liquid money. The orchid conservatory—yes, it had its own conservatory—was humid and warm and smelled like a very expensive funeral.
Everything was in order until the guest bathroom.
Laura pushed open the door, glanced at the marble countertop, and stopped.
There was a toothbrush in the holder.
Not her toothbrush. Her toothbrush was in her duffel bag, in its travel case, where it belonged. This toothbrush was blue, electric, plugged into the wall, sitting in a custom holder beside a tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed from the middle like a psychopath.
Laura stared at it. She stared at it the way a detective stares at a single drop of blood at a crime scene, with the slow, dawning understanding that something had gone terribly wrong.
She backed out of the bathroom. She walked to the kitchen.
On the counter, beside the espresso machine, sat a glass jar containing a bubbling, beige, slightly hostile-looking sourdough starter. Taped to the jar was a handwritten label in neat block letters: DO NOT TOUCH. YES, YOU.
The client's starter—the one in the contract, the one she was being paid to feed—was supposedly in the pantry. She checked. It was there, labeled *Archimedes* in Elliott Byers's handwriting.
So whose starter was this?
She heard footsteps. Heavy, confident, coming from the hallway.
Laura grabbed the nearest weapon—a marble rolling pin that weighed approximately as much as a small child—and positioned herself behind the kitchen island.
A man walked into the kitchen.
He was tall. Not dramatically tall, but the kind of tall that meant he could reach the top shelf without a step stool, which Laura, at five-four, found personally offensive. He had dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and the relaxed posture of someone who was exactly where he was supposed to be. He was wearing a robe. A very nice robe. A robe that Laura recognized from the master bedroom closet because it had been hanging there with a tag that read PROPERTY OF ELLIOTT BYERS—DO NOT USE.
He was using it.
He was using it and drinking coffee from what was clearly the good mug—the hand-thrown ceramic one with the maker's mark on the bottom—and he didn't even have the decency to look surprised.
"You're in my kitchen," Laura said, raising the rolling pin.
The man looked at her, then at the rolling pin, then back at her. "That's a Carrara marble rolling pin," he said. "It costs $800. You might want to put it down before you scratch it."
"I might want to put it through your skull. Who are you?"
"I'm the house sitter."
"No, *I'm* the house sitter."
He took a sip of coffee from the good mug. "Interesting. I've been here since Saturday."
"I was hired three weeks ago."
"I was hired five weeks ago."
They stared at each other across the island. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the house, a dog began to whine.
"You're a burglar," Laura said.
"You're a stalker," the man said.
"I have a contract."
"So do I."
"Show me."
"You first."
Neither moved. The dog whining grew louder.
A Weimaraner—gray, leggy, with the soulful eyes of a nineteenth-century poet who had just been told his funding was cut—appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked at Laura. He looked at the man. He walked to the exact center point between them, sat down, and gazed upward with an expression of profound emotional need.
"That's Gary," the man said.
"I know that's Gary."
"He needs to be told he's doing a good job."
"I know what he needs."
Gary looked between them, vibrating with the specific anxiety of a dog who sensed conflict and wanted both parties to know that he, personally, was available for comfort at any time.
The man set down the good mug. "I'm Adam Pham. Five-star rating on SitterSync, 4.9 on HouseGuard, and I have a verified review from a woman in Napa who said I kept her vineyard alive during a drought. Who are you?"
"Laura Decker. Five stars across the board. I once kept a glass house in Sedona without a single smudge for three months."
"The wellness influencer's place? The one with no curtains?"
"You've heard of it?"
"Everyone's heard of it. That job is legendary."
For one brief, treacherous moment, Laura felt a flicker of professional pride. She crushed it immediately.
"None of that matters," she said. "One of us isn't supposed to be here, and it's you."
"Funny. I was going to say the same thing."
Gary whimpered.
Laura lowered the rolling pin—not because she trusted Adam Pham—because the rolling pin really was very expensive and she was a professional. "We're calling the client," she said.
"Agreed."
"Right now."
"Right now."
They both reached for their phones. They both pulled up the same contact: Gina Chandler, assistant to Elliott Byers.
The video call connected on the third ring. Gina Chandler appeared on screen in what looked like a hotel room in Singapore. She was a woman in her mid-thirties with a severe bob, tortoiseshell glasses, and the expression of someone who had been expecting this call and had been dreading it for approximately five weeks.
"Oh," Gina said. "You've met."
"There's a man in my house," Laura said.
"There's a woman threatening me with kitchenware," Adam said.
"Right." Gina took a breath. "So. This is going to sound unusual."
"It already is unusual," Laura said.
"It's going to sound more unusual." Gina adjusted her glasses. "Mr. Byers has hired both of you intentionally. It's not a booking error. It's what he calls a 'residential redundancy experiment.'"
Silence.
"A what?" Adam said.
"He wants to test which of two elite house sitters performs better under competitive pressure. He read a book about it. Well—he read the summary of a book about it. On a podcast. While doing hot yoga." Gina's voice had the flat quality of someone who had long ago stopped being surprised by her employer. "The arrangement is as follows: both of you stay in the house for the full six months. When Mr. Byers returns, he will evaluate performance and select a winner. The winner receives the full fee. The loser receives nothing."
"Nothing?" Laura said.
"Nothing, and a one-star review."
The words landed like a brick through a window. A one-star review. In the elite house-sitting economy, a one-star review was not a minor setback; it was a death sentence. It was a scarlet letter. Nobody hired a one-star sitter to watch imported koi and a dog with a probiotic schedule. You'd be lucky to get a hamster in Boise.
"He can't do that," Laura said.
"He's a tech billionaire," Gina said gently. "He can do whatever he wants. It's in the contract. Page 47, subsection C."
"Nobody reads to page 47."
"Mr. Byers is aware of that. He considers it a feature, not a bug."
Laura looked at Adam. Adam looked at Laura. For the first time, their expressions aligned: mutual horror.
"Can we opt out?" Adam asked.
"You can leave at any time," Gina said. "But the sitter who leaves forfeits the fee and still receives the one-star review. Mr. Byers was very specific about that. He said—and I'm quoting—'Quitting is just losing with better posture.'"
Gary, sensing the emotional temperature of the room, pressed his head against Laura's knee and sighed.
"This is insane," Laura said.
"Yes," Gina agreed. "Is there anything else I can help with?"
"Can you tell your boss he's a sociopath?"
"I've scheduled that for Q2. Anything else?"
The call ended.
Laura and Adam stood in the kitchen of a mansion that now felt considerably smaller than it had five minutes ago.
"So," Adam said.
"So," Laura said. "I'm not leaving."
"Neither am I."
Gary looked up at both of them with an expression that said, clearly and without ambiguity, *I am available for emotional support, and I do not recognize the concept of sides.*
Laura picked up her duffel bag and walked toward the east wing.
The war had begun.
