Am I the asshole for going through my babysitter’s phone while she was in the bathroom?
I (27F) have been raising my son Darius alone since he was fourteen months old, working double shifts at a warehouse three days a week just to keep the lights on and his daycare paid. His dad has been gone for two years. It’s just us. So when I found a sitter I trusted, I held onto her like she was a lifeline.
Brianna (22F) has been watching Darius for about eight months. He loves her. Or he did.
About three weeks ago something changed. Darius is four. He doesn’t have a lot of words for big feelings yet, but I know my kid, and something was OFF. He started having accidents again after six months of being dry. He stopped wanting to eat dinner. And every time I mentioned Brianna’s name to remind him about the next day, he’d go quiet and find something to do in the other room.
I asked him directly if anything was wrong at Brianna’s house. He said no. I asked if anyone made him feel scared. He said no. I asked if Brianna was nice to him. He got very still and said, “She sleeps a lot.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
I started leaving a few minutes earlier to pick him up, trying to catch something, but everything always looked fine. Darius on the couch with a snack, some cartoon on, Brianna on her phone. Normal. Fine.
Last Tuesday I came home to Darius sitting by the front door in his coat and shoes. Alone. The door was unlocked. Brianna was nowhere in the living room.
My heart stopped.
I found her in the bathroom. She said she’d only been in there for a minute. She seemed off – slow, kind of glassy. She laughed when she saw my face and said, “Oh my God, he was fine, I was literally GONE for one second.”
I told her we needed to talk. She sat down at the kitchen table and put her phone face-down next to her hand.
And that’s when Darius came up to me, tugged my sleeve, and said, “Mommy. Brianna’s friend comes over. You don’t know him.”
Brianna’s whole face changed.
I looked at her. She picked up her phone fast and turned it over. I said I needed to use the bathroom and I’d be right back.
I wasn’t in the bathroom.
I came back around the corner while she was typing, stood behind her, and read the name at the top of the screen before she locked it.
And I know that name.
What I Know About That Name
Marcus Pruitt.
I know Marcus Pruitt because he is twenty-nine years old and he dated my coworker Shayla for eleven months and she had to get a protective order to make him stop showing up at her apartment. I know him because Shayla had a split lip in November and told our shift supervisor she walked into a cabinet door, and three of us knew that was a lie and didn’t know what to do about it. I know him because I have seen him twice in the parking lot of our warehouse waiting for Shayla after she’d already told him it was over, just sitting in a gray Civic with the engine running, watching the door.
That Marcus Pruitt had been inside my apartment.
Around my son.
I stood in the kitchen for what felt like a long time but was probably four seconds. Brianna was looking at her lap. Darius had gone to his room. I could hear him in there, the little wooden train set he drags out when he’s trying to be invisible.
I said, “Marcus Pruitt.”
She didn’t answer.
I said it again, not louder, just flatter. “Marcus Pruitt has been in this apartment.”
She said, “It wasn’t like that.”
I asked her what it was like, then. I kept my voice down because Darius has ears like a bat and I didn’t want him in the doorway.
She said Marcus was her boyfriend now. Had been for about two months. She said he was different with her. She said he’d come by a couple times when Darius was napping and it was no big deal, he never even went near Darius, she was always right there.
I asked her how she could be right there with Marcus if she was also in the bathroom sleeping.
She said she didn’t sleep in the bathroom.
What Darius Said Later
I paid her for the day. I don’t know why. Habit, maybe. Or I just needed her out of my apartment and handing her the cash was the fastest way to make that happen.
After she left I sat on the floor of Darius’s room and watched him run his trains for a while. He’s got this one engine he calls Big Red even though it’s orange. He was very focused on a tunnel he’d built out of couch cushions.
I said, “Hey. Brianna’s friend. The one who comes over. What’s he like?”
Darius didn’t look up. He said, “Loud.”
I said, “Loud how?”
He said, “He talks loud. And then Brianna talks loud back.”
I asked if they ever talked loud at him.
He thought about it. He said, “He called me little man.” He said it the way a four-year-old says something they’ve been told is a compliment but don’t quite believe. “I don’t like it.”
I said he never had to like it.
He put Big Red through the cushion tunnel and watched it come out the other side. Then he said, without looking at me, “He was here when I woke up from nap once. Brianna was sleeping. I was hungry.”
I asked if he got food.
He said no. He said he watched TV until Brianna woke up.
I asked how long.
He said, “A lot of shows.”
What I Actually Did With the Phone
Here’s the part where I’m apparently the asshole, according to some people online.
When I said I wasn’t in the bathroom, that’s true. What I did was stand around the corner of the hallway for maybe fifteen seconds while Brianna typed. I could see her reflection in the dark screen of the TV across from her. Not clearly, but enough to watch her type and send something. Then I came into the kitchen from the side, not straight on, and I was behind her before she heard me.
I didn’t touch her phone. I read the screen over her shoulder before she turned it over.
That’s it. That’s the thing people are calling a violation.
What I saw was the tail end of what she’d sent, which was: he wasn’t even there that long, she doesn’t know anything, just don’t come by for a while.
And his response, which was already there: she’s not gonna do shit. you worry too much.
I took a picture of the screen with my own phone before she locked it. My hands were steady. I don’t know why. I thought they’d shake but they didn’t.
She didn’t know I’d done it.
The Part Where I Didn’t Sleep
I called Shayla that night after Darius was in bed.
It was late. Almost eleven. She picked up on the second ring and I told her what happened and there was a long silence and then she said, “Oh God. I’m so sorry.” Not surprised. Just sorry.
I asked her what I needed to know about Marcus.
She talked for forty minutes. I sat at my kitchen table with a notepad and wrote things down in no particular order. Some of it I already knew from watching her go through it at work. Some of it was new. The part about his temper being worst when he felt like someone was trying to make him look stupid. The part about how he gets fixated. The part about how he’d told Shayla once that she was his and if she tried to leave he’d make sure no one else wanted her either.
She said, “He’s not gonna hurt a little kid. I don’t think. But I don’t know what he’d do if he felt cornered.”
I wrote that down too.
Then I asked her something I’d been sitting on for forty minutes: “Did you know he was with Brianna?”
Another silence. Shorter.
“I heard something,” she said. “I didn’t know he was going to your place.”
I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say that would’ve come out clean.
What I Did Next
Wednesday morning I called the childcare licensing board and asked what I was supposed to report when a babysitter allowed an unauthorized adult regular access to a child in her care. The woman on the phone walked me through it. I filed a report.
Then I called my building manager and had my locks changed. Thirty-five dollars. Brianna had a key. I don’t know if she ever gave Marcus a copy. I don’t know and I cannot know and that thought kept me up until two in the morning for three nights straight.
I texted Brianna and told her she was done. She responded with a long message about how I was overreacting and she’d never let anything happen to Darius and Marcus was not the person people said he was. I read it once and didn’t answer.
She texted again the next day. And the day after.
Marcus texted me once from a number I didn’t have saved. Just: you should mind your business. I screenshotted it and added it to a folder on my phone.
Darius’s preschool knows not to release him to anyone but me. They’ve known that since he started. But I called and said it twice more anyway.
The Part That’s Still Not Over
Darius had an accident on Thursday. He came to me with wet pants and this look on his face like he was waiting to be in trouble, and I just picked him up and said it was okay, it happens, let’s get you changed. He put his head on my shoulder and stayed there for a minute.
He hasn’t asked about Brianna.
I don’t have a new sitter. I’ve been burning through favors with my neighbor Donna, who’s sixty-three and retired and has been more than patient about it. My next double shift is in five days and I don’t have a plan yet.
The people in the comments who said I was wrong to read that screen: I hear you. I do. But my son sat alone by a locked door in his coat and told me a man I know to be dangerous had been in our home. I had about eight seconds to decide what to do. I’d do it again. I’d do it faster.
What I’m not going to do is pretend the last eight months were fine. They weren’t fine. Something was off and I felt it and I kept telling myself I was being paranoid, she’s great with him, he loves her, don’t ruin a good thing.
That’s the part I’m still sitting with.
Not the phone. The three weeks I talked myself out of what I already knew.
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If this hit close to home, pass it on. Someone else might need to hear it.
If you’re looking for more intense tales of parental instincts kicking in, you might find solace in reading about a daughter who almost wasn’t allowed into the car, or how a sticky note led to a son being pulled from school. And for a different kind of drama, see what happened when a husband’s response revealed everything about a certain table.
