Chapter 1
The suitcase was already by the front door when Alessia Romano came down the stairs. She had not been told she was fired yet — not officially, not out loud — but someone had taken twenty minutes to pack her life into a gray secondhand case and turn the handle toward the exit. Twenty people stood in the foyer to watch. At the bottom of the staircase, Dante Moretti said nothing at all, which was how the whole house knew to be afraid. Alessia did not take the termination letter. She asked why her suitcase was already packed. Then she surrendered her key, and turned to go, and a voice crossed the marble floor like a dropped glass. Stop.
CHAPTER 1 — THE UNJUST FIRING
The suitcase was already beside the front door.
Alessia Romano saw it from the landing, and for a moment everything else in the foyer went soft at the edges — the chandelier, the twenty faces, the folded white apron — because the suitcase was the only thing in the room that meant anything.
Someone had packed it for her.
She came down the last three stairs slowly, one hand on the banister, and took the room in the way she had taught herself to take rooms in this house: fast, and without turning her head.
Housekeepers in black uniforms stood along the east wall, hands folded, eyes forward. Two security men waited near the staircase, jackets buttoned despite the warmth. At the center of the marble floor stood Mrs. Conte, head of household, holding a folded white apron in one hand and a single sheet of paper in the other.
And behind all of them, at the bottom of the grand staircase, stood Dante Moretti.
Alessia had worked in this house for seven months, and in seven months she had learned one thing about him that no one had needed to tell her. Dante Moretti did not raise his voice. He did not have to. Silence arrived in a room before he did, the way cold arrives before snow.
Mrs. Conte cleared her throat.
“Alessia Romano. Your employment with the Moretti household is terminated, effective immediately.”
Alessia looked at her.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“No.”
Mrs. Conte’s mouth tightened. “You entered Mr. Moretti’s private study last night.”
A murmur moved along the wall of uniforms. Alessia did not look toward Dante. She kept her eyes on the older woman, on the paper in her hand, on the apron she had ironed herself two days ago.