Chapter 9
We met three days later.
Andrew arrived carrying a bakery box.
He was taller than I expected.
Dark hair.
Nervous hands.
My father's eyes.
Again.
I wondered how many times in my life I was going to discover those eyes in rooms where I wasn't prepared to see them.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
Neither of us knew what to do.
Finally, Evelyn stepped forward.
"I'm Evelyn."
"I know."
"Of course you do."
She hugged him.
Not dramatically.
Not for long.
Just enough to tell him he had not walked into the room alone.
When she stepped back, Andrew looked at me.
"You look like him."
"So do you."
He gave a small, uneasy smile.
"Aunt Clara says that's unfortunate for both of us."
From inside the conservatory, Clara called, "I can hear you."
For the first time in days, all of us laughed.
It didn't erase anything.
That was what surprised me most.
Reconciliation wasn't erasure.
No one suddenly decided the past was harmless.
Andrew apologized to Rosa and the other employees in writing, without excuses.
He agreed to help our auditors reconstruct the reserve accounts.
Evelyn admitted to Harrison that she had allowed him to believe an authorization came from me.
Harrison admitted that he had stopped asking questions because my preference for efficiency had trained him not to.
And I did something I had never done before.
I called the household staff together.
Not in the formal dining room.
In the kitchen.
There were nineteen people.
I knew six names.
That fact embarrassed me more than I expected.
"I owe all of you an apology," I said.
No speechwriter.
No notes.
"You were asked to trust systems I didn't personally understand. And when those systems failed, some of you carried the consequences while I didn't even know there was a problem."
I looked around the room.
"I used to think being a good employer meant paying well, providing benefits, and staying out of people's way."
Harrison stood near the back.
Rosa stood beside the pantry.
Camila was there too, because school had ended early and Rosa couldn't find childcare.
She watched me with familiar seriousness.
"I still think those things matter," I continued. "But I've learned something else matters too."
I looked at Camila.
"Knowing people."
Her mouth curved into a tiny smile.
We changed the household payroll system.
No single person could alter routing details.
Every employee received direct confirmation of payment.
There was a confidential way to report problems directly to Margaret's office.
And once a month, I ate lunch with whoever was working at the estate that day.
The first lunch was awkward.
I tried too hard.
Everyone could tell.
By the third month, it became ordinary.
I learned Rosa liked old detective movies.
Harrison had a granddaughter learning the violin.
Mrs. Kim, who had worked in the kitchen for eleven years, was saving to open a small catering business with her sister.
Luis, one of the groundskeepers, wrote poetry.
And Camila?
Camila liked astronomy.
She wanted a telescope.
Not an expensive one, she informed me.
"A real one."
"What's the difference?"
"The expensive ones can still be bad."
Another lesson.
She eventually received one for her birthday.
From her mother.
Not me.
Rosa insisted.
May you like
I respected that.
But I did arrange for Camila and three classmates to visit the Griffith Observatory with Evelyn, who somehow knew more about constellations than any of us had realized.
