She shrugs, but there is anger in it. “Everyone leaves. Nannies leave. Tutors leave. One cook cried in the pantry and left after three days. The last lady who cleaned our rooms said she had to go because her back hurt. She took my purple hair ribbon.”
Sofía whispers, barely audible, “She said she’d come back.”
A silence opens in the hallway, tender and awkward. You know that silence. It lives wherever children have learned not to expect consistency and women have learned promises are expensive.
You crouch so you’re closer to their height. “I can’t promise forever,” you say. “But I came to work, not to disappear.”
Sofía’s fingers tighten on the rabbit. Valentina seems about to say something sharp, then decides against it. Instead she narrows her eyes. “If you’re lying, I’ll know.”
You almost laugh. “Then I guess I’d better be careful.”
That, somehow, is enough. They move on down the hall, the older one pretending not to glance back, the younger one doing it openly. When they vanish around the corner, you straighten slowly, feeling the ache in your knees and something heavier in your chest.
Children tell the truth more quickly than adults in houses like this.
That afternoon, while scrubbing the lower cupboards in the breakfast room, you hear the handyman again. He is somewhere beyond the open service door, working on a loose shutter or maybe pretending to. You catch fragments of his voice when he asks the gardener for a wrench. Deeper than you expected. Controlled. Not rough with fatigue the way laboring men’s voices often are by midday. He sounds like someone borrowing the shape of tiredness rather than truly wearing it.
Later, when you carry a basket of linen through the rear hall, you nearly collide with him.
He steps aside quickly, one hand lifting to steady the basket before it tips. His fingers are clean beneath the grease smudges. Strange thing to notice, but you do.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Was my fault,” you answer automatically.
His eyes meet yours then, properly, and the brief contact unsettles you more than it should. They are dark, almost black, but too observant to belong to a man no one notices. Most workers in homes like this learn invisibility as a survival art. This one seems to resist it simply by existing.
“You’re new,” he says.
You adjust the basket in your arms. “So are you.”
A hint of something moves through his expression. “Temporary repair job.”
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