That night I opened my notebook.
Looked at Dominic's name.
The question mark beside it.
Does he know?
I crossed it out.
He knew.
The question now was something far more complicated, far more inconvenient, and if Clara was right far more important to get right before I made another move.
I wrote the new question slowly.
Whose side is he on?
Stared at it.
Added because I was nothing if not honest with myself in the dark of my room when no one else could see.
And does it matter?
I closed the notebook.
It shouldn't matter.
I knew that.
I just needed the rest of me to catch up.
He was waiting for me on Thursday morning.
Not in the obvious way not standing in my path or summoning me through Clara the way he could have. That would have been easier to handle. Dominic Coldwell didn't do obvious. He was sitting in the open study with the door pulled three-quarters shut, and when I passed with my cleaning caddy at 7:05 he said my name through the gap without raising his voice, the way people spoke when they'd been waiting long enough that they didn't need to perform urgency anymore.
"Brooks."
I stopped.
Pushed the door open with two fingers.
"Sir?"
He was behind the desk, jacket on despite the early hour, a file open in front of him that he wasn't looking at. He was looking at me.
Morning light came through the window behind him and made it harder to read his expression than I'd have liked.
"Come in. Close the door."
The door closing was the part that required the most careful management not the action itself, but what I did with my face during it. A fraction of a second when my back was to him. I used it.
By the time I turned around I was attentive and mildly curious and completely unafraid.
"Sit down."
I sat.
He looked at me for a moment in the way that had become familiar over two weeks that unfinished calculation, that persistent sense of a man pulling at a loose thread he hadn't identified yet. Then he turned the file on his desk around and slid it toward me.
My employment file.
I looked at it without touching it.
"Your reference from the Meridian," he said. "I called them yesterday."
The air in the room didn't change. I didn't let it.
"The manager confirmed your employment," he continued. "Three months, housekeeping, exactly as stated. He spoke well of you." A pause. "Very well, actually. Specifically, he said you were the most detail-oriented member of staff he'd had in years."
I said nothing. Waiting.
"That's an interesting thing to say about a housekeeper," Dominic said. "Detail-oriented. It's not the usual language."
"Some managers are more articulate than others."
"Some are." He leaned back slightly. Not relaxed just redistributing the stillness. "I also spoke to the agency."
"And?"
"And everything checks out." He held my gaze. "Every single thing in this file is exactly what it should be."
The word should sat in the sentence like a splinter.
"Then I'm not sure what the concern is, sir."
"The concern," Dominic said quietly, "is that everything checking out perfectly is itself unusual. Most people's histories have texture. Small inconsistencies. A gap between jobs, a referee who takes three days to call back, an address that doesn't quite match the postcode." He tilted his head slightly. "Yours doesn't. It's smooth. All the way through."
He wasn't accusing me. He was thinking out loud, I realised or performing thinking out loud, which was either a strategy or simply who he was. A man who processed aloud and didn't mind if you heard him.
That was dangerous in a different way than I'd prepared for.
"I'm organised," I said. "I've always kept my paperwork in order. Is that a problem?"
"No."
"Then"
"I'm not finished." Not sharp. Just certain. "You're twenty-four. You have three years of hospitality work, good references, clean record. You applied for a live-in position in a private household and accepted a salary twenty percent below your market rate without negotiating." He paused. "Why?"
Because negotiating would have meant more conversations. More time to be looked at closely.
"Stability matters more to me than salary right now," I said. "I told the agency that."
"Why does stability matter more to you right now?"
I let a beat pass. Then I looked down briefly not evasively, just the look of someone deciding how much to share and back up.
"I had a difficult couple of years," I said. "Personal reasons. I needed somewhere settled. Somewhere I could " A small breath. "Quiet down for a while."
It was the most honest thing I'd said to him. Dressed in a different context, rerouted through my cover story, but honest at its core in a way that apparently showed, because something in his expression shifted. Just slightly.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, and it didn't sound like a formality.
"It's fine. I'm fine."
A pause.
"Are you."
Not a question an observation, delivered gently enough to be almost kind, and I had not prepared for kindness from Dominic Coldwell. I had prepared for suspicion and authority and the particular coldness people described when they talked about him. I had not prepared for him to say I'm sorry like he meant it or look at me like he could see the edges of something I was covering.
I kept my expression steady through what felt like significant effort.
"Yes," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he closed the file.
"I want to be straightforward with you," he said. "I don't have cause to let you go. Your work is exemplary Clara speaks highly of you, which she does not do lightly. There's nothing in your record that gives me grounds for concern." He pressed the file to one side. "But I run this household and everything in it with a particular standard of awareness.
And something about you has been sitting wrong for me since Monday morning."
"What something?"
"I don't know yet." The honesty of it was almost startling. "When I do, I'll tell you."
I looked at him across the desk this man who had written a letter to his father about the Hartwell matter, who had argued with Gerald for two hours and gone quiet after, who noticed things other people didn't and apparently saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
This man who was, I was becoming increasingly and inconveniently aware, nothing like I had needed him to be.
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me?" he asked.