Chapter 2 - Crying Lets the Sad Come Out
The doctor arrived with a medical bag and the expression of a woman who had been dragged away from something important. She took one look at my flushed face and stopped being irritated.
"Elena, how long have you had trouble breathing?"
"Since this morning. Maybe last night."
"Maybe doesn't help us." She clipped an oxygen monitor to my finger and listened to my chest. Then she asked Alessandro to step outside while she examined me. I watched him leave without argument, which surprised me almost as much as his appearance in the first place.
Emma, still wrapped in his jacket, sat at the foot of the bed eating crackers he'd found in our kitchen. When the doctor explained that I might have a serious respiratory infection, I saw my daughter stop chewing. She understood the tone, if not the words.
"Is Mama going to the stars?" she asked.
The doctor set down her stethoscope. "No, sweetheart. I'm going to help your mom get better."
I wanted to promise the same thing, but promises had become dangerous in our family. Emma's father had promised to come back from a construction job in Pennsylvania. He never did. A truck hit his car on the interstate before she was old enough to remember his voice. I'd spent three years making little assurances and hoping life didn't overhear me.
The doctor ordered additional tests and arranged for treatment. She wanted someone with me overnight. I told her my closest friend was working a double shift in Queens.
"Then somebody here will help," Alessandro said from the doorway. He had returned carrying a fresh glass of water and a sandwich on a plate.
"You have a mansion full of employees," I said. "I don't want one of them fired for babysitting me."
"No one is getting fired for helping you."
I looked at him. "Someone already told Emma the opposite."
His gaze settled on the oversized jacket around her shoulders. "I intend to find out who."
The doctor didn't appear impressed by his authority. She wrote down instructions and told him that if my breathing worsened, he should arrange immediate hospital care. She made him repeat the warning signs. Watching a man reportedly capable of terrifying whole neighborhoods answer a doctor's questions with perfect seriousness would have been funny under different circumstances.
After she left, Alessandro asked Emma whether she'd like warm socks. She accepted on the condition that he also feed her stuffed rabbit, a floppy white creature named Pudding, who apparently hadn't eaten breakfast. Alessandro presented the rabbit with an imaginary cracker. Emma laughed.
I hadn't heard that sound in two days.
"You shouldn't make a habit of visiting," I warned when she went to retrieve the rabbit's blanket. "She's little. She gets attached."
"So do adults."
"Adults usually know better."
He held my gaze, then looked away first. "Usually."
He told me a nurse from the estate clinic could stay until my fever improved and asked whether I preferred to remain in the cottage or move temporarily to a guest room. The question mattered. Moneyed people had a way of presenting instructions as generosity. I'd lived in other people's houses long enough to recognize it.
"Here," I said. "This is her home."
"Then here."
When he left, I called my friend Naomi and told her enough to make her swear. Naomi worked in a hospital billing office and had helped me find the Moretti job eight months earlier, after my hours at the diner were cut.
"You let a three-year-old go to his laundry room?" she demanded.
"Do you think I planned it?"
Her tone softened. "I'm sorry. How are you feeling?"
"Like a truck ran over my lungs. And like I just met a man I'm supposed to be terrified of."
"You are supposed to be careful, Elena. Those are different things."
She reminded me that the agency had rejected my original employment application, then called back three weeks later with a surprisingly generous offer. At the time I'd considered it a miracle. Naomi had said a person didn't refuse a miracle just because its timing was suspicious. Now she sounded less certain.
"Who called you back?" she asked.
"A woman from administration. I don't remember her name."
"Find out."
I promised I would. Then I fell asleep halfway through a sentence.
At dusk, I woke to voices outside the cottage. Alessandro was arguing quietly with Franco Bellini, the estate's household manager. Through the partly open window, their words came and went on the wind.
"She was hired through the proper channels," Franco said.
"That's not what I asked."
"Vittorio signs the final approvals. He said she came recommended."
"Recommended by whom?"
A long silence followed.
The next morning, Alessandro returned with a small bag of children's socks and a replacement furnace repair order. He stood awkwardly in the doorway until I invited him inside. Without his coat, I could see pale scars disappearing beneath the collar of his black shirt.
"You don't owe us all this," I said.
"I employ you. A working furnace isn't a gift."
"The socks?"
He looked almost embarrassed. "Emma said her feet were cold."
My daughter emerged from under her blanket and inspected the purchase. They had yellow ducks on them. She pronounced them perfect.
Then she asked the question only a child would dare ask. "Mr. Grumpy, do you have a little girl?"
He went still. "No."
"What about a little boy?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Sometimes people don't get the things they thought they'd have."
I recognized the sound beneath his answer. It wasn't anger. It was an old ache he kept carefully folded away.
Emma considered him. "You can borrow Pudding for a hug."
He accepted the rabbit as solemnly as a medal. I watched something change in his face and felt the first small, unreasonable tug toward a man I knew almost nothing about.
Then his phone rang. This time he answered.
"Tell Vittorio I'm coming," he said. "And nobody goes near that cottage without my permission."
He handed Pudding back to Emma and left. My daughter waved until he disappeared around the hedge.
I was still holding my mug when the nurse noticed a sealed envelope slipped beneath our door. It contained a copy of my employment agreement and a handwritten note: SOME PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW EXPENSIVE A GOOD JOB CAN BECOME.
May you like
There was no signature. But underneath the note, pressed so hard into the paper that the ink had dented the page, I could see the faint outline of a second message.
I held it toward the light. Two words emerged: FIND HER.
