Chapter 1 - “DID I DO GOOD?”
I found my housekeeper’s three-year-old daughter barefoot in my laundry room, scrubbing one of my expensive shirts in ice-cold water because my estate manager had convinced her that her sick mother could lose both her job and their home.
I wasn’t supposed to be home.
A meeting had been canceled, so I returned several hours early.
Halfway down the service hallway, I heard a tiny voice.
“Please come out… Mr. Luca needs this shirt.”
I opened the laundry-room door.
And froze.
Nora stood barefoot on a wooden stool wearing one of my shirts like an enormous apron.
Her arms disappeared inside the sleeves as she scrubbed furiously at a blue ink stain.
The sink was filled with freezing water.
Her little hands were red and swollen.
“Nora?”
She jumped.
The stool slipped.
I caught her before she hit the floor.
Instead of crying, she grabbed the wet shirt.
“I’m sorry. I can fix it.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Sick.”
“Did she tell you to wash my clothes?”
Nora shook her head quickly.
“Mama told me to color until she felt better.”
“Then why are you here?”
Her eyes dropped.
“Mr. Harland said people who don’t work can’t stay here.”
My stomach went cold.
Edwin Harland had managed my estate for seven years.
I trusted him with almost everything.
Nora held up the shirt.
“I almost got it clean.”
Her hands trembled beneath the wet fabric.
“Did I do good?”
“No, sweetheart.”
Her face crumpled.
“I can scrub harder.”
That sentence reached somewhere money had never been able to touch.
When I was eight, I had watched my own mother wash other people’s clothes until her fingers cracked because missing work meant we might not eat.
I had spent decades escaping that childhood.
Yet somehow, the same fear had entered my own home.
I wrapped Nora’s hands in a warm towel.
“You never have to wash my clothes.”
“But if Mama loses her job…”
“She won’t lose her home because she got sick.”
Nora stared at me.
As though I had just changed a law of nature.
Then I looked at the security camera.
The red light was blinking.
Good.
“Where’s Mr. Harland?”
She pointed toward my study.
I took her hand.
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Because the person I was angry with wasn’t the three-year-old who had ruined a custom shirt.
It was the grown man who had taught her she needed to earn the right to have a home.
