I wish I had never taken that job offer. It looked totally normal at the time, a basic uniform, no required skills, maybe the hours were a little strange( 12pm-3am) but I was dying for the extra pay and it definitely payed well. It was a Starbucks, nothing out of the ordinary, or so I thought.

Clara Williams was the most normal person you would ever meet, she woke up at 5am every morning, she went for a run until exactly 5:30 when she would arrive home and start to cook her breakfast, egg and toast at 5:35. she would feed her cat at 5:40 and get in the shower at 5:45. At 5:50 she would walk out the door and at 6:15 every morning she would arrive at Mrs keens house where she would baby sit her daughter until 10:00. At 10:10 she would buy herself a coffee( a medium gingerbread latte to go) from the coffee shop around the corner from where she lived. On Thursdays she would do the weekly shop and arrive home at 11:00 but every other day she would arrive home at 10:30 where she would watch the new episode of true crime until 11:00( they didn’t run on Thursdays). As long as she had lived on her own( 7 years) she had started her day this way and she always would. The only problem with this was that she wasn’t making enough money from just the nanny job, as lovely as mrs keen and her daughter were, they weren’t exactly well off themselves.

She had been in and out of different jobs for over three years now, since her last job let her go. She was getting by, but only just and it wouldn’t hold for much longer as Mrs keen and her daughter were going away next week, that’s seven days with no pay and she knew she wouldn’t last two. She’d worked in accounting and architecture and interior design and real estate and banking but all with no luck, she just didn’t fit!

The day everything changed was the 15th of February 2020, the day after another Valentine’s Day spent watching cheesy rom coms with her cat. She had gotten an email asking if she was still looking for full time employment, she had replied immediately, no longer caring how desperate she was because after all, she was really bloody desperate. She had gotten a response almost instantly with the link to a survey that they wanted her to fill out- still not having mentioned who they were. She had clicked the survey anyway not even stopping to wonder if it was a con, lucky for her, it wasn’t. The survey was an audio survey- asking questions in a bland, emotionless, robotic attempt at a female voice and Clara responded in her brisk but clear clipped speech that came from attending oxford university in her earlier years...