Chapter 5
The silence in the kitchen held for so long that Corrie lost the thread of the night. The clock above the stove showed 11:20, then 11:40, and through all of it no one came down the stairs, no one went up, and no further sound came from the second floor.
Rosa finished the onions, swept them into a bowl, and picked up another. She did that work the way she had done it for twenty years, and that night she did it exactly as she had on every other night.
Near midnight, the wheels of a suitcase began rolling across the stone of the corridor.
Corrie was on her feet before she had time to think. She reached the kitchen doorway just as Everett Whitlock passed.
He was wearing his overcoat, pulling the suitcase with his right hand, while his left arm was pressed against his body in an angle that was not natural, and he walked with a slight lean. Aside from that, he remained entirely the man she had seen every day for four months: hair combed, collar straight, not a single mark on his face.
He stopped before the main entrance. He turned his head and looked at Corrie for exactly one second. Then he smiled.
It was not the smile of a man who had just lost. It was the smile of a man closing his ledger because he had finished recording the day’s work. And Corrie stood rooted to the tile, watching until the door closed behind him and the sound of the suitcase wheels died away across the courtyard.
She turned back toward the kitchen. Rosa had gathered the onions into a large bowl and was washing the knife beneath the faucet. Corrie asked whether that meant he was truly gone.
Rosa turned off the water, dried her hands on her apron, and for the first time that evening she raised her eyes to Corrie. She looked at her for a long time with an expression Corrie couldn’t read. Not relief, not fear — something suspended between the two.
Then footsteps sounded on the servant staircase, and Domenico Moretti came into the kitchen. He had removed his coat, and the sleeves of his shirt were neatly rolled to his elbows. He stopped about four paces away and came no closer.
He didn’t ask whether she was all right. He didn’t ask how many times it had happened. He said only:
“Whitlock won’t be coming back. Starting tomorrow, you’ll carry the keys.”
Corrie heard him but didn’t understand at first. She asked which keys he meant.
“All of them.”
He looked at the rag still twisted in her hand, studied it for about two seconds, and added, “The third-floor stairs don’t need cleaning at night anymore.”
Then he walked out, and Corrie stood in the middle of the kitchen with the wet rag in her fist. It should have been the moment the weight lifted from her body. But she wasn’t thinking about the keys or the staircase.
May you like
She was thinking about the right-hand drawer of a desk, about three sheets of paper a man had taken with him in a suitcase, and about a smile that had promised her something she could not yet name.
She lay awake until the light came, listening to the sea wind against the windows, and she understood nothing. But something in her was already counting, the way she had counted all her life — weeks, days, bus fares, pages of a letter read nine times — and her body had begun to count forward from the first day of October without being told to.
