Chapter 9
The house was very quiet the next morning.
Clarissa’s things were packed by noon and carried out by two men Theodore had hired from the city. The staff watched from the windows. No one spoke. The white orchids in the front hall had begun to drop petals on the marble, and no one had swept them.
Theodore came to the kitchen at eleven o’clock. Nadia was at the sink. He stood in the doorway, and for a moment he looked like a boy who had broken something and did not know how to say so.
“Nadia.”
She dried her hands.
“I don’t know how to apologize,” he said. “I don’t know what to say that would be enough. I believed her. I looked at you and I believed her, and I’ve known you for seven years.” He rubbed his face. “I paid for your sister’s surgery and I thought that made me a good man. It didn’t. It just made me a man who wrote a check.”
Nadia looked at him. She had spent so long being grateful to this man that gratitude had become a kind of gravity. It was strange to stand in it and feel something else.
“Mr. Hawthorne,” she said, “I don’t want money.”
He blinked. “Nadia—”
“Juny Prell lost her job because Clarissa needed someone to blame. She’s a design student. She needs her place here and her tuition. Mila’s medical account needs to be put in writing, in a trust, so no one can take it away again. And the staff — all of them — deserve to hear from you that what happened was wrong. Not just from me.”
Theodore stared at her. Then he nodded slowly. “All right. All of it. And you? What do you want for yourself?”
Nadia thought about it. The answer surprised her.
“I want to stay,” she said. “For now. But I want it understood that I stay because I choose to, not because I have nowhere else to go.”
Theodore’s eyes were wet. “Understood.”
Eleanor came to the kitchen before she left. She stood in the doorway with her coat over her arm and looked at Nadia for a long moment.
“You have more sense than my son,” she said. “If you ever want a different life, come to me. I know people who would be lucky to have you.”
Nadia smiled. “I like my life, ma’am. I just want to be allowed to live it.”
Eleanor nodded, as if that were the right answer. At the door, she paused. “The notebook. Oswald’s. What should we do with it?”
“Give it to Mr. Hawthorne,” Nadia said. “He should know what was happening in his house.”
That afternoon, a lawyer came.
He was a thin man with a leather briefcase and a voice like a closed door. He sat in the drawing room with Theodore and Nadia and laid a document on the table.
“Miss Voskin,” he said. “My client is prepared to offer a settlement. A generous one. In exchange for your signature on a nondisclosure agreement. You will not speak to the press. You will not testify. You will not discuss the events of the past four months with anyone.” He slid a pen across the table. “The amount is on the first page.”
Nadia looked at the number. It was more money than she had earned in seven years.
She thought of Mila, of the apartment, of the years of counting every dollar. She thought of Juny in the pantry. She thought of her mother, who had said nothing, and of the door that had not opened.
May you like
She picked up the pen.
The lawyer smiled.
