My name is Dana. Two weeks ago I started work as a nanny for the Whitfield boys, six-year-old twins in a house so big I needed a map.

Their mother had died the winter before. Their father, Mr. Whitfield, worked eighteen hours a day. In two weeks the boys hadn’t smiled once.

I didn’t try to fix them. I sat on the carpet in my pink uniform, took out a little toy microphone and started to sing the silly song my grandmother used to sing to me.

First Theo picked up his toy guitar. Then Max began drumming on a tin bucket. By the third verse both of them were laughing so hard that they fell over.

I didn’t hear the front door. I looked up, still singing, and saw Mr. Whitfield standing motionless in the hall with his keys in his hand and his eyes wet.

I froze. I thought I was about to lose my job. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, scrambling to my feet. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘Please don’t stop,’ he said.

He sat down on the carpet, in his suit, and the boys crawled into his lap. Max looked at him and said, ‘Daddy, you’re home.’ It was the first time either of them had said anything to him in weeks.

We sang until it got dark. Mr. Whitfield asked me what the song was called. I told him it had no name.

‘My wife used to hum that exact tune,’ he said. ‘I have not heard it since she died.’

I stared at him. My grandmother had never taught that song to anyone but me.

We worked it out over tea in the kitchen that night. My grandmother and his late wife’s mother had grown up in the same village. The song was a lullaby from a place neither of us had ever seen.

Mr. Whitfield came home at six the next day. And the day after. He never again worked past dinner.

Two years later, I’m still their nanny. The house has a piano now. And every night, three voices sing the song with no name.

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