But I didn’t feel like doing homework, and instead I did something I’d been wanting to do since I started sitting for the Duprees but never dared: I snooped.

Kitty Burns Florey’s Philip and Me and the Closet was another of those wonderfully serendipitous finds. I was reading a Language Log article that mentioned Ms. Florey’s book about sentence diagraming, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog. I remembered the essay from last year’s Best American Essays collection — it was a charming gem — so I followed the link. But the link wasn’t to the sentence-diagraming essay; it was to a reflection on Ms. Florey’s stint as a nanny.

As I read the story, I couldn’t help but think about the nannies we had for two years — Chrissy on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and Kaja on Wednesday and Friday. I chuckled at the stories about young Philip feeding himself Spaghetti-Os — “[c]ertainly more than half of Philip’s dinner ended up other places besides his tummy” — and at his insistence on being read the same book every day. I sighed with fatherly love at the description of a sleepy Philip’s “little head flopping against my shoulder as I carried him into his crib” — the boys are still floppy when they’re sleepy, but they’ll soon be too big to carry to bed. There didn’t seem to be much to the story, really, but to someone with kids who are young enough that you remember those early toddler days, but old enough that you don’t remember that clearly, it was a sweet and well-written reminiscence.

And then it suddenly turned dark, with a snooping session in a closet. In a non-descript box, Ms. Florey finds something that makes her feel “repelled and fascinated and frightened” all at once, and there ends her time with Philip.

What makes the essay particularly strong at this point is that we never see the details of what she finds — we know they’re photographs, probably pornographic, possibly sadistic, but we’re left to imagine the worst. And imagining the worst, we feel the same crisis of conscience that Ms. Florey feels: “I began to feel that I had betrayed Philip, that he would miss me and not understand why I was gone, that maybe I had been someone he needed in his life”; but at the same time “I knew I couldn’t enter their apartment again, could never feed Spaghetti O’s to their poor little boy, could never again take their money”.

In the end — not to spoil things for you — we see that children are resilient and resourceful and, much to their credit, have very short memories. This tightly-constructed, beautifully-written essay reflects on the power of adult memory and the dangers hidden in dark closets; it’s well worth the read, and has me on the lookout for the book-length version of Kitty Burns Florey’s sentence diagram book (a much lighter topic, I hope).