The Strangers

Emma and Chess run upstairs when they hear Finn’s cries. Finn asks how their mother could have texted Ms. Morales without her phone. Natalie’s attempts to explain it logically fall on deaf ears. Chess and Emma defend their brother, agreeing with Finn that something is definitely wrong. Their distress breaks through Natalie’s boredom, her demeanor turning into something resembling sympathy, and she agrees to help. Emma, the only one who knows her mother’s passcode, unlocks the phone, and Natalie tries to determine if the text came from a different device. She finds a series of messages, prewritten, set to be sent at various times over the next week. The final message says, “I have to stay away for good, to protect them” (87). She adds that she will mail Ms. Morales a letter with a full explanation for the kids, “when they’re ready” (87).

Emma suggests that perhaps their mother needs their help, not the other way around. They resolve to find the letter now rather than wait a week for it to arrive by mail. The children search the house for their mother’s laptop, concluding that perhaps a draft of the letter exists on its hard drive. As Chess ponders a future without their mother, he reassures himself that it’s all a misunderstanding. The alternative is too awful to contemplate. 

While Finn searches his mother’s closet for clues, Natalie stays close by his side, looking for a way to help. When Ms. Morales pokes her head in the door and tries to hurry them along, Natalie stalls her, giving the kids more time to search the house and proving herself an ally. She instructs Finn not to tell Ms. Morales about the final text message. Finn wants to run into Emma and Chess’s arms, but he stays in his mother’s closet, inhaling the smell from her clothes.

Emma explores the basement and finds her mother’s office—which they call the “Boring Room”—locked. She retrieves the key from its hiding place in the leg of the couch. Before she opens the office door, Chess calls from upstairs; they found their mother’s personal, not-for-work laptop. Emma is relieved. The Boring Room spooks her a bit; when her mother is working in there, she seems different. Despite her reservations, she unlocks the door and enters her mother’s office to look for clues. In one of the desk drawers, she finds her mother’s work computer. Without her phone or her laptop, it seems unlikely that she is on a business trip at all. 

As they leave the house, Natalie reminds them not to tell her mother about the last text. “‘Mom will go crazy,’ Natalie said. ‘She’ll call social services and the police and the FBI and the TV news’” (104). Although Finn wonders why that would be such a bad idea, Natalie is adamant. Once inside the SUV, she reverts to her surly teenager persona, complaining about having to take the time to help “this little boy find his lovey” (106). A quick wink to the kids in the back seat, however, suggests it’s all an act. Ms. Morales promises the kids pizza for dinner, but none of them can muster much excitement for it. Once they are settled in the Morales’s home—a “mansion” compared to theirs—Natalie and the kids conspire to meet in Ms. Morales’s office after she goes to bed.

Later that night, Chess, Emma, and Finn meet Natalie with the laptops and phone. Natalie informs them that, aside from her job as a realtor, her mother also moonlights as a private investigator, mostly gathering evidence on cheating husbands. Chess is certain that the Joe his mother spoke to the night before is not a boyfriend. Checking his mother’s phone, Chess finds all of her texts, emails, and phone calls are deleted. Next, they check the laptops, and Emma discovers a file labeled “FOR THE KIDS.” When they open it, they find a few brief sentences from their mother prefacing an explanation, but the rest of the letter is “gibberish.”