Chương 6
“So you said.”
“You don’t know her.”
Damian glanced toward the stairs.
“No. That’s become obvious.”
Grant’s expression shifted.
“I have run this house for six years.”
“Yes.”
“I have protected your property, your privacy, your family.”
“My family doesn’t live here.”
“Exactly. You weren’t here. Someone had to keep this place functioning.”
Damian felt the truth inside the accusation.
Grant saw it.
His voice softened.
“You trusted me.”
“I did.”
“And now a seven-year-old tells you a story and suddenly I’m a monster.”
“No.”
Grant’s eyes narrowed.
“The camera helped.”
For the first time, Grant lost a little color.
“That was for safety.”
“Whose?”
“Claire had panic attacks. She fainted once.”
“So you put a camera in a windowless room.”
“You have cameras all over the property.”
“Not in bedrooms.”
“It isn’t a bedroom.”
Damian looked at him.
“You put a cot in it.”
Grant rubbed his mouth.
“I was trying to help my wife.”
The sentence sounded almost sincere.
That was worse.
“What does Claire say you were doing?”
Grant laughed without humor.
“You heard her. She said she went in voluntarily.”
“She also looked terrified of you.”
“You don’t know what my marriage looks like.”
“No.”
“You’ve never been married.”
Damian raised an eyebrow.
“Interesting defense.”
Grant’s nostrils flared.
“I know what you think of people like me.”
“People like you?”
“Employees who live in somebody else’s house.”
Damian said nothing.
Grant continued.
“You show up four weekends a year and think you understand what happens here because your name is on the deed.”
That hit harder than Grant intended.
Or exactly as hard.
Damian could not tell.
“You want to be the hero?” Grant asked. “Fine. You’re rich enough to buy that feeling. But when Claire wakes up tomorrow without a job, without housing, with a child to feed and a police report tied to her name, you’ll go back to Manhattan.”
Damian’s jaw tightened.
Grant leaned closer.
“You get to care for a night.”
Michael moved forward.
Damian lifted a hand.
Not yet.
Grant smiled faintly.
“That’s the difference between you and me.”
Damian stared at him.
Then he said, “Get out.”
Grant did.
The front door closed.
For several seconds Damian stood looking at it.
Mara came down the stairs.
“He got under your skin.”
“No.”
“He absolutely did.”
Damian turned.
“Can Claire and Sophie remain here?”
“If Claire wants to, yes. But think carefully before you convert employer-provided housing into charity with strings she didn’t ask for.”
“I wasn’t planning strings.”
“Rich people usually aren’t. That’s why they don’t notice them.”
He gave her a look.
She shrugged into her coat.
“Get some sleep.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Then lie down angrily.”
Claire refused to speak to Damian that night.
He accepted it.
She took Sophie to one of the guest rooms in the west wing because she said she could not return to the staff apartment she had shared with Grant.
At two in the morning, Damian walked through his own kitchen and found a catering tray of untouched miniature lemon tarts.
He ate two standing beside the refrigerator.
Then a third.
His father would have called it undisciplined.
Damian ate a fourth out of spite toward a dead man.
The house was finally quiet.
No investors.
No servers.
No police.
No Grant.
Just the mechanical hum of refrigerators and the occasional settling noise of an old building pretending not to be old.
Damian stood in the kitchen holding half a tart.
Grant’s words kept returning.
You get to care for a night.
Damian put the tart down.
He hated that sentence because it resembled the truth.
The next morning Claire knocked on the library door at seven fifteen.
Damian had not slept.
He had changed into another black shirt but still wore the same trousers from the night before. His steel watch lay on the desk beside three pages of notes he had made and crossed out because every proposed solution sounded like something a wealthy man did to make discomfort disappear.
Claire stood in the doorway in jeans and a dark sweater.
Without the gray uniform, Damian almost failed to recognize her.
That embarrassed him.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course.”
She entered but did not sit.
Her hands were clasped tightly.
“Sophie told you things.”
“Yes.”
“Some of them aren’t accurate.”
Damian waited.
Claire glanced at the chair.
He gestured toward it.
She sat on the edge.
“Grant didn’t put me in that room every night.”
“All right.”
“It wasn’t every night.”
Damian felt something cold move through him.
Claire looked at his face.
“You see? That. That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you.”
“What?”
“You get angry and everything becomes simple.”
He leaned back.
The criticism was so unexpected he almost laughed.
“Nothing about this feels simple.”
“It does to you.”
“How?”
“Grant bad. Claire scared. Little girl tells billionaire. Billionaire fixes it.”
The word billionaire sounded ridiculous in her mouth, less like status than diagnosis.
Damian folded his hands.
“Is that what Sophie thinks?”
“That’s what Sophie hopes.”
“And you?”
Claire looked toward the window.
Morning traffic moved behind the trees beyond the gates. A delivery truck waited at the service entrance because no one had updated the schedule after the previous night.
Life had arrived at the house whether they were ready or not.
“I think you should fire me,” Claire said.
Damian stared at her.
“Why?”
“Because I stole from you.”
There it was.
A reversal so ordinary it almost felt absurd.
“How much?”
“Eleven thousand dollars.”
Damian did not respond immediately.
Claire mistook the pause.
“It happened over two years.”
“Where?”
“Household accounts. Vendor reimbursements.”
“Did Grant know?”
She laughed once.
“Grant taught me.”
Damian looked at her.
Claire rubbed her thumb against her palm.
“He said we were underpaid. He said everybody with money skimmed from everybody else, they just called it fees. The first time was three hundred dollars from a landscaping invoice. Then six hundred. Then more.”
May you like
“Why?”
“Because I was stupid.”
