Katherine Alexander and Marisa Ivan were cuddled up on their couch, watching a movie. It could have been February, or November, or August, or April. Most of the past year had begun to blur together for them.

Only one thing kept this night separate from the previous spring: the quality of the movie. Early in the lockdown, Kat and Marisa had tried to limit their tastes to classy pictures, Oscar winners and modern classics and the like. Over time, their resolve in this area had weakened. Now, they were watching some sub-Lifetime mom-in-peril flick.

"Who is she again?" Marisa asked, furrowing her brow, pointing at a blonde on the screen.

"The daughter's best friend," Kat said.

"And she's ... sleeping with the husband?"

"We don't know for sure yet," Kat said. "My Husband's Secret Mistress is still a secret."

"This movie is so hard to follow," Marisa complained. "I've seen Christopher Nolan movies less confusing than this."

Well, I might have had something to do with that, Kat thought, and suppressed a smile. Out loud she said, "Hey, do you want some grapes?"

Grapes were their chosen dessert, partly because they were the healthy choice, but mainly because there were only a few months out of the year where New York was warm enough to buy ice cream and not feel weird about it.

There was a clear plastic bowl, half-full with grapes, on the coffee table. Marisa had pointed past it whenever she asked about what was happening on screen. Marisa said, "Come on, you're going to make me get up and go to the fridge? I'm all comfy."

Kat's heart quickened, as it did whenever they played like this. Even knowing it would work, she got a thrill every time. When she spoke again, he voice was lower, more emphatic. It became a Hypnotist Voice. "Marisa, feed me a grape."

Marisa's eyes went glassy as the trigger took hold. Moving with the speed of a woman underwater, she leaned toward the coffee table and picked a single grape out of the bowl. At the same languid speed she moved back to Kat and slipped the grape between Kat's waiting lips.

Kat took the grapes slowly, tasting Marisa's fingertip with her lips, shivering with pleasure as Marisa's eyes remained distant and glassy throughout. She bit into the grape, savored its juice, chewed its flesh. Once her mouth was sufficiently empty to get the words out clearly, she said, "Good girl."

Marisa closed her eyes, smiling dreamily and sighing as the pleasure hit her. It was not a full orgasm -- locked down in the apartment as they had been, one of the first lessons they'd learned was that Marisa could get painfully sore unless they paced themselves -- but it was enough pleasure that Kat could feel Marisa shivering with the force of it as they cuddled.

As they pleasure died down, Marisa laid her head on Kat's shoulder. Presently she opened her eyes, the trance interlude forgotten, and said, "Wait, did the mom change clothes in the middle of the scene?"

"No, babe," Kat said. "This is a commercial."

"God, commercials," Marisa muttered. "Movie's confusing enough without 'em."

Kat had lost count of the grapes around six or seven, and that had been near the end of the previous movie. Time to wrap it up.

"Ris, look here for a second," she said, lifting her index finger up in front of Marisa's face. Marisa started to zone out as her eyes' focus changed, just like she always did. Kat needed no further work; she simply tapped Marisa in the middle of the forehead with her finger and said, "Sleep."

Marisa went limp, her body slumped against her lover's. "On the count of three," Kat murmured into her ear, "You'll awake fully, refreshed and alert, remembering everything we've done. One, two, three."

Marisa inhaled slowly as she lifted her head. She looked at Kat, still somewhat woozy, and grinned. "That was nice," she said. "Why'd you stop?"

"You said we have an early call tomorrow," Kat said, taking the bowl of grapes and crossing to the kitchen.

"Oh, right," Marisa said. "This one could be for real. Said her sister was mixed up with someone gross."

Kat and Marisa's anti-mind-control business was one which had not suffered during the pandemic. The situation made many more people vulnerable and lonely, ideal prey for charismatic gurus. Though K&M Consulting had not done any extractions since the world had slowed down, they did enough consultation calls over Zoom that, at fifty dollars for an hour-long call, they were easily covering their expenses.

"You vetted her, right?" Kat said. "I don't want to start the week with another one of those calls."

One of the drawbacks of their explosion in business was that Kat and Marisa got a great many calls from people to whom they could provide very little help. People whose friends or loved ones had been taken in by the-disease-is-fake conspiracies, or anti-vaccine conspiracies, or election-related conspiracies, or all three at once ... the list went on and on, with Facebook and other social media fueling the fire.

All such people -- whom Kat referred to as "those callers," with no need to explain further -- would beg Kat and Marisa to hypnotize their loved ones and convince them that the conspiracies were nonsense. When Kat explained to them that hypnosis did not work that way, the calls often turned ugly, no matter how gently Kat tried to tell it. Sometimes there were shouts and accusations of fraud, but more often there were heart-rending tears from the client. It was a genuinely traumatic aspect of their work, which they put a lot of effort into dealing with, including stepping up their vetting process of potential customers.

"Yeah, I looked up the caller and her sister," Marisa said. "The caller seems completely non-conspiratorial, and Sis isn't even on social media."

"Lucky her," Kat said, as she put the grapes back into the refrigerator. "She could be reading a message board or listening to a podcast somewhere."

Marisa shrugged. "I checked other family members too. There's no mention of it anywhere on the socials."

"Fine," Kat said. "Maybe we'll even get to leave the apartment on this one."

"Yeah, that would be nice," Marisa said. "I think I'm gonna turn in."

"You don't want to see how the movie ends?"

Marisa replied with a wry grin, "I barely remember how it began."

---

The following morning, Kat and Marisa showered and did the maximum amount of cleaning up before the 9 a.m. call. Kat insisted they wear something other than sweatpants or yoga leggings, just in case one of them needed to stand up during the call. Gotta look professional, Kat would say. Like, before-times professional.

Their Zoom station had been set up early on in the lockdown, when Marisa had envisioned how their business would have to evolve with the times. Even though neither woman was much of a video gamer, they took their inspiration from many of the top streamers on Twitch, and used similar hardware.

They sat side-by-side at their computer desk, the webcam catching them both in a two-shot. They had often tried to present themselves this way even in the before-times; Kat believed that this sort of presentation created an impression in the client's mind that they would take equal share of all duties.

The caller entered their virtual waiting room five minutes early. Her name, as was the case for many people who were unfamiliar with Zoom, was her email address: debra@remingtonmodels.com.

"Huh," Marisa said in a funny voice.

Kat froze, the mouse button hovering over the button but her finger not clicking. "What?"

"I could've sworn she told me her name was Debra Remington," Marisa said, "And her Facebook says 'Debra R.' But it looks like Remington is her employer? And she's using a work email?" That last part was expressly forbidden in the rules email that they sent to all prospective callers.

"We'll get it straightened out," Kat said, and clicked.

A new window appeared. Kat and Marisa had both looked at her social media, and so they knew what to expect, but it was still surprising in person: an incredibly beautiful woman of about thirty. Warm coffee-colored eyes were perfectly framed by alabaster cheekbones, and her dark hair was professionally coiffed in such a way that she resembled an old-school Hollywood movie star. "Hello," she said, and without further preamble she continued, "Which of you is Katherine and which is Marisa?"

Kat introduced herself as she always did: "Call me Kat."

"And I'm Marisa Ivan," Marisa said.

"Debra Remington," the dark-haired woman said.

Kat asked, "Debra, are you using a work email?"

"Can't be helped, I'm afraid," Debra said. "But you don't need to worry about security issues. My sister owns the company, and I basically run the day-to-day."

"Just because you run the company doesn't mean you can't get hacked," Marisa said.

"Well, if we do, the legal liability is on me," Debra said, frowning slightly. "Can we get on with this?"

Kat nudged Marisa's leg with her own. They had their nonverbal cues down to a science by now; Marisa knew she was basically saying Whatever. "Sure," Marisa said. "Your sister who owns the company ... I assume she's the same person who's having the problem?"

Debra let out a breath, as though she'd been briefly holding it. "I should just get this out there up front," she said. "I haven't been completely honest with you."

This time Kat kicked Marisa's ankle: You said you vetted her! Marisa kicked back: I did!

"I mean," Debra hurried on, "There is a problem, and my sister Amanda is involved. But I thought that if I told you the full truth, you'd ignore me completely."

"What is the problem?" Kat said.

Debra's mouth tightened. "I think my sister's doula is, um, a witch."

Marisa felt another kick on her ankle. She slowly repeated, "A witch."

"And I am not talking about, like, a Wiccan," Debra said. "I know they're okay. I mean I think she wants the baby for ... you know ..."

"We saw the movie," Kat said, trying to keep a harsh tone out of her voice. It was too goddamn early in the morning for her to flash back to the night she and Marisa, already mentally frazzled by the then-young pandemic, had practically dived behind the couch while watching The VVitch for the first time. "That's quite an accusation."

"I know," Debra said, looking at the floor. "I know. It sounds absurd. But I swear to you I am of sound mind. I even went to a psychologist to get a clean bill of--"

"Say that we believed you," Kat said, cutting her off. "I mean, I'll be honest, I don't believe you, but we'll get to that part in a minute. So say that we did believe you: why would you come to us? What about our operation says 'witch hunter' to you?"

"Um," Debra said. She looked thrown by Kat's brutally honest statement, which was the entire point. Kat liked to employ brutal honesty to shatter the mental blocks that clients often had. "I think her ... witch thing ... is controlling my sister's mind, and her husband's. The message board I went to said that you can help with that sort of thing."

"Hmmm," Marisa said. She hadn't known their names were going around on message boards somewhere on the internet, but that was a question for later. "But we're not, like, Glinda the Good Witch over here. We use science, particularly psychology."

"I know," Debra said. "And if you want to tell me to fuck off, I get it. I do. But..."

She looked up, and both women noticed that tears were running down Debra Remington's cheeks. When Debra spoke next, her voice was wavering.

"But I'm out of options," she said. "Her OB thinks it's normal, just hormones or something. Her friends never met the doula, they don't know. Our parents are dead. I don't ..." she issued a single sob. "I don't have anyone else."

Debra reached for a tissue from a box that was just off-camera. She was expecting to cry on this call, Kat thought. Debra blew her nose noisily, forgetting to mute the Zoom, angling her face off-camera as she did so. Then she reached for a second tissue and began using it to mop up her ruined mascara.

"If you think something is about to happen to your niece," Kat said, more gently than before, "then there's always the police, right?"

"There's no point calling the police," Debra said. "They can't help me."

"I'm not the biggest fan of the police these days," Kat said, "But you're talking about kidnapping. Maybe worse. That's literally their job."

"They just can't," Debra said, tossing away the second tissue. "Can't help me."

"Our work puts us in touch with U.S. Marshals or the FBI, sometimes," Marisa added helpfully. "If you don't trust the police, we have other connections--"

Debra gave a single sharp shake of her head, almost like a twitch. "There's no fucking point!" she shouted. "They can't help me!"

Kat laid her foot over Marisa's, gently this time, instead of a kick. Hang on. This might be something. Marisa, who had been thinking of ways to let this woman down easy, bit her tongue.

"The reason I don't believe you," Kat said slowly, "is that a lot of people seem to think what we do is magic. I've seen a lot of strange things in this job, but I've never seen any magic, witchy or otherwise. For an accusation like you're making, I would need evidence."

Debra let out a long, shaky breath, apparently to keep herself from shouting again. "I'm the evidence," she said. "I know my sister, and I know her husband. They're not acting right."

"But we need more evidence than that," Kat said, keeping her voice slow and quiet. "And so would the police."

"No point," Debra muttered. "They can't help me anyway."

Kat nudged Marisa with her elbow, but Marisa had already noticed: There's no point. The police can't help me. The phrasing wasn't just similar, it was the same every time.

As though programmed.

"Have you ever seen this person doing anything unusual?" Kat said. Her voice was even slower and quieter than before, becoming her Hypnotist Voice.

Marisa blinked her eyes open, and said, "Excuse me, I have another call." Giving Kat a look that said, Or else I won't stay awake over here.

"Um, I don't think so," Debra said. Her own voice had gotten calmer, and the sharp displays of emotion she had already shown seemed quite far away.

"One thing that comes up a lot in my work," Kat said, "is that people don't get upset like you just did, unless they've seen something. Even if you can't remember what you saw. Will you let me help you?"

"If it will help you believe me," Debra said. "Anything."

"Lift your hand up in front of your face," Kat said, demonstrating with her own hand. "Like this. Just above your eyes. Turn your body just a little."

Debra did as she was bid, turning her body so that her hand did not block Kat's view of her face. She was already beginning to stare at her hand with the intensity of a student preparing for a big test.

"Close your eyes," Kat said in her hypnotist voice. "Think about that hand, the way that its temperature changes here and there, the way the skin color shifts over its surface."

Debra blinked slowly. She's going fast, Kat thought.

"For the average person, the skin is the heaviest organ," Kat said. "Take a deep breath in, and as you let it out, just imagine all of that skin hanging on the bone, weighing it down, making it so heavy."

Kat added extra emphasis to the word heavy, as she always did. She expected the hand to twitch, feeling gradually heavier with every passing breath, as it slowly lowered into Debra's lap. Instead, Debra's hand dropped instantly, a puppet with the strings cut. Her head dropped with it, lolling forward.

Whoa, Kat thought. She'd never seen this before, not even with a great subject like Marisa. "That's right, heavy and relaxed," she said, improvising as she tried to think fast. "You're doing so well," she added, somewhat louder, as she got up from her chair and crossed to the bedroom door.

Marisa was pacing in the living room. Kat gestured for her to come back to the bedroom.

Marisa mouthed, Already?

Kat gestured again, more emphatically. Yeah, I know!

When Marisa saw what was on the computer screen, her mouth formed an O of surprise. Kat had to physically pull her over to the chair as she said, "Debra, can you tell me what the doula's name is?"

Debra's lip twitched before she was able to mutter, "Stella."

"That's right," Kat said. "Hearing your own relaxed voice just helps you relax more and more. Now, I'd like you to send your mind back to a time when something strange happened with Stella. Anything at all, the first thing that comes to mind. What do you see?"

Debra's eye brows twitched, twice. Her lip twisted slightly, which Kat would have taken as a deep frown in a fully awake person. "Can't," she murmured. "It's ... hazy."

Kat leaned forward in her chair. She was in her element now; Marisa might as well not have been there. "Do you see anything at all?"

"I ..." Debra's brow had furrowed by now. "Hazy."

"You're doing so well," Kat said. This wasn't actually going so well at all, but it was important to keep the subject positive. "Now, I'd like you to imagine a door in front of you. Any kind of door at all. Focus on the door handle. When you see the door handle clearly, give your head a nod for me."

Almost instantly, Debra's head bobbed up and down. Someone's hypnotized her before, Kat thought. Just gotta get to the memory.

"On the count of three, you're going to open the door," Kat said. "When you open the door, you're going to be there with yourself and Stella, the time that something strange happened. Do you understand?"

The head bobbed up and down again.

"One, ready to pass through the door. Two, hand on the door handle. Three, passing through the door. What do you see?"

"I'm in..." Debra's mouth curved again, into the lazy frown. "It's Amanda's house. But it's so hazy."

"Look to your left," Kat said, her voice getting even more quiet. "You'll see a circular dial on the wall. This dial controls the haze. As you turn the dial, the haze becomes less and less. Realize how the haze is becoming less each time you hear the dial click."

Kat punctuated the last word with a snap of her fingers. Marisa started; she hadn't been in trance, exactly, but it was so easy to zone out when Kat was doing the thing.

At the sound of the finger snap, Debra's eyebrows twitched again. Kat took this as an encouraging sign. "Just turn the dial under you hear the next click," she said, with another finger snap. "And with each click," snap, "the haze floats away, less and less hazy with every click," snap, "the room getting brighter and clearer with every click," snap, "and you will turn around and see everything clearly after the final turn of the dial right now."

Kat snapped her fingers one more time, and Debra's face went completely slack. "I need to go out for groceries," she mumbled. "Amanda's feet are too sore to go."

Marisa fumbled for a notepad and began writing. Kat said, "Amanda is still pregnant?" Matching the client's use of the present tense.

"Yes," Debra said.

"What do you see now?"

"I forgot my list," Debra muttered. "Have to come back. I'm in the kitchen because I forgot my list and I have to come back."

"You're doing very well," Kat said. As often happened when she began to strike gold, she had to expend some effort to keep her voice calm. "What do you see now?"

"Amanda and Stella are at the kitchen table," Debra said. "Amanda is slumped over the table. I think she passed out."

Kat and Marisa exchanged a look. "What do you see now?"

"I'm asking Stella what happened," Debra said. "She's saying everything is fine, Amanda is fine. I think I should call 911 anyway. She says okay, use my phone, it's right here. She's holding her hand out and..."

Debra trailed off. Her head slumped even further forward, the chin resting on her chest, the movie-star hair hanging like curtains in front of her face. Kat and Marisa exchanged another look as Kat said, "And what?"

Debra said nothing. Her chest rose and fell.

"What do you see now, Debra?"

"Dark," Debra said. Her voice was quiet and muffled; if she were not using the AirPods, they might not have been able to make out what she was saying. "Dark and I'm falling. Or floating. Or both. Can't make my legs work. Hands holding me up."

Kat asked, "Is Stella saying anything?" She knew it was a loaded question. But then, she also was fairly sure of the answer.

"I dunno," Debra said. Her speech was starting to get sluggish. "She's a witch. Police cannelp me."

Kat paused for Marisa to get caught up in her note-taking. "What's happening now, Debra?"

Debra lifted her head slowly. Her eyes were still closed, the hair half-covering her face. "One," she said slowly. "Two. Three."

Debra opened her eyes slowly. She did not move to push her hair out of her face. Marisa gestured, questioning: Is she still under?

Kat nodded, and said, "Debra, where are you?"

"I'm in the kitchen with Amanda," Debra said, in the same drowsy voice. "I forgot my keys. Stella said she's going to look in on the baby. When she leaves, I whisper to Amanda that something is strange with her. Like she's a witch or something."

"And what does Amanda say?"

"She just laughs," Debra said, still staring at nothing. "Says, what are you going to do, call the police? And I know she's right. There's no point. The police can't help me."

"You've done so well, Debra," Kat said. "In a moment I'm going to count to three. When I reach three, you'll open your eyes and awake, fully aware that you were under hypnosis, and completely remembering everything we talked about. One, two, three."

Kat punctuated the third number with a snap of her fingers. Debra blinked a few times, then looked at her webcam, confused. "I was hypnotized?"

"Yes," Kat said. "And not only by me. You can feel it, can't you? The similarity between what I did and what Stella did?"

Debra's eyes got glassy for a second with the memory, then she blinked again. "Yeah," she said. "But I thought ... I mean she didn't make me stare at a pocket watch or a candle flame, like you did with my own hand."

"There's all sorts of ways to hypnotize someone," Kat said. "Stella was probably trained by an Ericksonian. By a certain point in Erickson's career no one wanted to shake hands with him at parties, because he could trance them in the space of a handshake, by touch alone."

"Oh my God," Debra murmured.

"Wait, I don't get it," Marisa said. "Debra still thought she was a witch after the trance was over. So it didn't work?"

"No, it worked," Kat said. "This Stella is a tricky one. Suspicion is a strong emotion, especially where a family member is involved; if Stella just told her to forget her suspicions, she probably would have resisted. So, instead, she took Debra's suspicion and re-directed it toward this idea of witchcraft, an idea the police would never believe even if she resisted enough to call them."

"I'm calling the police," Debra said, starting to rise from her chair.

"No, wait," Kat and Marisa said, nearly simultaneously.

Debra looked at her camera again, half-risen from her chair. "What?"

"She hasn't actually done anything," Marisa said.

Kat said, "The suggestion she gave you implies that she's up to no good, but it doesn't actually prove the existence of wrongdoing."

"But the baby," Debra said.

"The baby might not even be her plan," Kat said. "It might be part of the whole 'witch' misdirection. Maybe she's just out for money, or she wants to seduce your brother-in-law or something."

Debra sat back down. "So what do we do?"

"We need to know everything about this situation," Marisa said. "How long has Stella been there?"

Debra looked away. "Eight months or so. Amanda was already pregnant when they found her."

"And how did they find her?"

"I found her," Debra murmured.

Kat and Marisa exchanged another glance as Kat said, "Okay, and how did you find her?"

"I ... found her ..." Debra trailed off, staring into space. Her eyes were glassy again, as they had been when she had been staring at her hand. Just as Kat was about to use some kind of wake-up language, Debra shook her head, blinking the glassiness out of her eyes. "I dunno, however people meet people," she said.

"I mean," Kat said carefully, "this is not a friendship, right? It's a professional relationship. You had to look at her resume and check her references, right?"

Debra's brow furrowed slightly. "Yeah," she said. "I got her resume from ... from ..." Her brow smoothed out, and her eyes became glassy again. Marisa counted three seconds before Debra shook her head a second time. "She checked out fine," Debra said.

"Well, we'd like to follow up, just to be sure," Marisa said. "I'll arrange a quiet, sanitized place where we can meet in person, and you can show me her paperwork."

"Eight months or so," Debra said again. "Has she been hypnotizing Amanda that entire time?"

"Probably," Kat said. "The husband, too, I suspect, just because it would be impossible to hide from him, especially during a pandemic."

"How has Amanda been acting lately?" Marisa said. She did not look at the camera, so furiously was she taking notes.

"Just ... listless," Debra said. "Uninterested. She doesn't want to do anything."

"That could just be the pandemic talking," Kat said. "You might have just described us, last night."

"No, it's different," Debra said. "They live in the suburbs. She could go out for a walk and still be socially distanced. She used to like going for walks, even before the pandemic. But not any more."

Marisa frowned as she wrote it down. Kat said what they were both thinking: "It's thin. If I wasn't one hundred percent sure you had been hypnotized, I wouldn't buy it."

"What about the husband?" Marisa had not looked up from her notes. "What's his name?"

"Sean," Debra said. "He's been in the office a lot lately."

Kat and Marisa said nearly simultaneously, "The office?"

"He's a trader, Wall Street," Debra said. "They're considered essential workers."

"Of course they are," Kat said dryly. Marisa kicked her leg under the desk: my dad's finance job paid my way through music school, you know.

"They're taking all kinds of precautions," Debra said, shrugging. "Or at least he says they are. It's been crazy late hours for him. That's why they started asking me to come over to help out."

"How does he get to work and back?" Kat's voice was starting to get a tone that Marisa knew well. She was Having An Idea. Marisa hoped this was better than the last idea, which had led to a mind-control quack persuading Kat to clean her bathroom floor with a toothbrush.

"Their car, of course," Debra said. "The Metro North train is where the virus first started spreading in the city, last year. It's the only good thing the firm has done for him during the pandemic, they gave him a stipend for gas and parking."

"You don't think..." Kat was talking fast, but caught herself and re-phrased. Because of that, Marisa knew what the question was going to be before she even asked it. "I hate to ask this, but do you think he was having an affair?"

Debra shook her head. "I can't see it," she said. "I've heard stories about guys who freak out when they have kids and bail on their wives. But Sean? Not him. Two years ago, I would have told you he wanted kids more than Amanda did."

"You're sure? Not even between him and the doula?"

"I'm not completely sure of anything, now that I know she was hypnotizing me," Debra said. "But I can't see how it would be Stella, because she's at the house all the time and he's not home often enough."

"Speaking of Stella," Marisa said slowly, "where did you find her? I don't know a lot about hiring a doula. Is there an agency? Is she certified by anyone?"

"Well, I think..." Debra's voice trailed off, yet again. Marisa thought of what Kat often said to her, when they did memory play: trying to remember just sends you deeper.

Marisa and Kat shared a look: they both knew Marisa had re-asked the question a second time on purpose. Kat said, "Debra," not raising her voice but putting emphasis on the word, like she sometimes did when giving Marisa waking suggestions.

Debra blinked, coming to after a couple of seconds. "I'm sorry," she said, sounding as though she had no idea she'd been away. "Forgot what I was going to say."

"I'm sure it will come to you," Kat said, giving Marisa a look which said, It won't.

"Look, what the hell are we going to do here?" Debra hit the word with such force that her hair bounced. "This woman is messing with my sister's mind, and I'm scared that she's got some kind of plan for my niece!"

"We can't call the police," Marisa said. "Hypnotizing someone, even in the dishonest way that she does it, is not illegal. And whatever plan you think she has, unless she wrote it down somewhere, is just speculation on your part."

"In my professional opinion," Kat said, "Your best plan is to persuade Amanda to kick this woman out."

"I mean, I've tried that," Debra said. "Amanda feels dependent upon her, for the baby. She's entrenched."

"Well, that's what you have us for," Kat said. "We need to make some plans, figure out what the expenses for a job like this would be. Can we call you back tomorrow morning, same time?"

"Of course," Debra said. There was a further exchange of planning and exiting pleasantries, but for Kat and Marisa's purposes the call basically ended there.

"What do you think?" Marisa said, after the screen went dark.

"It's a Hand That Rocks The Cradle, no question," Kat said. They'd watched that particular film during one of their trashy-thriller binges during the pandemic.

"No way," Marisa said. "Did you see her hair? She looks like money, and she runs the company her sister owns. I bet the doula's just in this for as much cash as she can get. Swiping jewelry, the whole thing."

"There are easier ways to scam someone than volunteering to clean up baby shit," Kat said.

"Ugh," Marisa said, closing her notebook. "You couldn't hypnotize me into doing that."

"Maybe not," Kat said, "but we might have to hypnotize someone into doing it."

"Don't tell me you want to do the undercover thing again," Marisa said. "Not after last time."

"No," Kat said. "Well, sort of, but not the same way as last time. That house has been a closed system since the pandemic started. No way we can get close enough to do what we need to do in there."

Marisa cocked her head. "So what are you thinking?"

"Remember the last movie we saw in a theater?"

Marisa shook her head. Kat went over to their shelf of Blu-Rays; can't be a slave to Netflix for the really great ones, she liked to say. She pulled out a disc and showed Marisa their copy of the Best Picture of 2020, Parasite.

TO BE CONTINUED