Chapter 4
Sunday arrived wrong.
Mara knew it from the moment she stepped off the elevator at 7:15 with her cleaning kit and found Carver already in the foyer. He had the posture of a man who had received news he didn’t know how to organize yet.
“Marcel wants the full floor clean before ten,” he said. “Everything. Including the study.”
The study was never included.
“Everything,” he said again.
She started on the guest suites and worked from the outside in. Things had changed overnight. She could tell from the specific disorder of certain spaces—not random, but directional, like someone had been moving through rooms looking for something specific.
In the second guest suite, someone had moved the bureau six inches from the wall. She could see the marks in the carpet. They’d put it back, but not precisely.
In the small office adjacent to the salon, a painting on the east wall was three degrees off its original hang. She knew because she’d straightened it herself two weeks ago.
In the connecting hallway between the main and secondary staircases, two wall panels that she’d always understood to be decorative had recently been disturbed. The dust displacement around the lower edges told her someone had been through this floor last night after the party, and whoever it was, they knew the floor plan well enough to move through it without triggering the alarm system.
She was cataloging all of this while cleaning. Do the task in front of you and let your peripheral intelligence do the other thing simultaneously. Don’t let either one show on your face.
She was in the main salon on her knees scrubbing a champagne spill from the floor near the fireplace when Dante Marcel walked in.
She heard him before she saw him. The specific sound of his walk—unhurried, but always covering ground faster than it should.
She looked up. He was in dark trousers and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled. He was carrying a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. He stopped when he saw her.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning, Mr. Marcel.”
She went back to scrubbing. He didn’t leave.
“How long have you been here this morning?”
“Since 7:15.”
He paused. “Did anything seem unusual to you last night?”
She stopped scrubbing. Sat back on her heels. Looked at him.
He was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen on his face before. Not quite suspicion. Not quite trust. Something in the narrow space between them, waiting to land on one side or the other.
She made a decision in the space of about two heartbeats.
“One of the catering staff switched the reserve wine bottles. I moved them to the service pantry. I told Dana there was a label mix-up.”
Something changed in his face very slightly. The kind of change that would have been invisible if she hadn’t been watching for it.
“Which bottles?”
“Your personal service marker. The 2018 reserve. Both bottles. They’re still on the top shelf in the service pantry behind the napkin ring supply box.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Not threatening. Just thorough.
“Anything else?”
She thought about the alcove. She thought about Sienna’s smile. She thought about the notation folded in her pocket and the clip on her phone’s encrypted backup.
“Not that I can confirm,” she said.
It was technically true. She could confirm the wine bottles because she’d handled them. Everything else was observation without documentation.
He nodded once. He left the room.
She went back to scrubbing the champagne from the floor. Her hands were completely steady, which surprised her a little, because her heart was doing something complicated behind her sternum that had nothing to do with calm.
She tried to resign at 2:00.
She went to Carver’s office and stood in the doorway and told him she needed to give her notice, effective as soon as he could arrange a replacement.
Carver stopped clicking his pen.
“That’s not possible right now,” he said.
“It’s two weeks’ notice. That’s standard.”
“I mean it’s not possible right now in this specific moment, Ms. Voss, because Mr. Marcel has specifically requested that the full household staff remain available through the rehearsal dinner on Thursday.”
He started clicking the pen again.
“After that, you can discuss it with me. Not before.”
She went back to her floor. She thought about just leaving. Gathering her things from the locker. Walking to the elevator. Going home. Nobody could physically stop her. She had savings. She had options. She could be on a train to her mother’s apartment in Yonkers by four in the afternoon. This entire thing—the ledger, the clean hands, the alcove conversation, the smile—could become a thing she’d once known and carefully forgot.
She thought about this with real seriousness, standing in the service corridor with her back against the wall.
Then she thought about Monday. About whatever was supposed to be done by Monday. About the third column. About the ring on Sienna’s finger.
May you like
She wasn’t going to Yonkers.
She hated knowing that about herself. But she knew it.
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