Part 4 — I Caught My Fiancée in the Maid’s Room, but When Something Fell from the Pillow, She Stopped Smiling for the First Time

After the doctor’s last words, Nathan locked the door.

Victoria leaned against the wall.

“Elliot is coming,” she whispered.

“Did you call him?” Nathan asked.

“No.”

“Then how do you know that it is him?”

Victoria fell silent.

I went to Arthur’s bed and covered his shoulders with the blanket. His breathing was weak, but his eyes shone clearly.

“Maria, go downstairs,” Nathan told me.

“I will stay with you.”

“This time no one will send you away.”

The word “this time” struck my heart. He knew how close he had come to turning his back on me.

Outside, car tires passed over the gravel.

Victoria’s phone came to life again. A short message appeared on the screen: “Go out through the window. Everything is over.”

Nathan read it.

“Who is it from?”

Victoria could not answer.

“From Elliot,” I said.

Downstairs, the lock of the entrance door turned.

Nathan called security, but panic sounded in his voice for the first time.

“Lock the north wing. Let no one enter.”

A few seconds later, heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor.

Elliot appeared in Arthur’s doorway. He was wearing a black jacket and holding a leather bag.

“This is all a misunderstanding,” he said.

“You were at the clinic,” Nathan replied.

“To collect documents.”

“To steal my father’s medical records?”

Elliot shifted his gaze to Victoria.

“She was doing everything. I was only preparing the documents legally.”

Victoria turned her face toward him.

“You told me that no one would be harmed.”

“You were the one who demanded the dose be increased.”

His own words destroyed the room.

Elliot fell silent and then realized that Nathan was holding the phone. Nathan pressed the recording icon.

“Repeat it,” he told him.

“I said nothing.”

“We all heard it.”

Elliot stepped back, but two security employees were already standing in the doorway. A few minutes later the police arrived too. Victoria sat in an armchair, her hands placed on her knees, looking at the ring she had shown everyone throughout the year.

Her lawyer came twenty minutes later. He listened to the recording, looked through the documents, and took Victoria aside.

“Will you defend me?” Victoria asked.

“Until I learned that you recorded all this yourself, perhaps. Now, if you listen to my advice, you will not speak at all.”

“I will pay you money.”

“Money cannot change what you have already said.”

For the first time Victoria was left alone. She had neither her fiancé beside her, nor a lawyer, nor her beautiful words.

The next day, the recording was officially transferred at the police station. Only the desk lamp was lit in the room. Victoria sat behind the glass, while I stood on the other side.

They turned on the recorder.

“Maria? No one will believe her.”

Victoria raised her head.

Then her laughter was heard.

Not the laughter she showed Nathan. A real, cold, confident laughter.

“People like that always look guilty when they work in a rich house.”

Victoria lowered her eyes.

“I did not say it like that,” she said quietly.

“You are saying it yourself,” the officer replied.

“I do not remember.”

I watched myself behind the glass. For six years I had thought that my voice meant nothing in this house. Now the pronunciation of my name in her own laughter stood against her.

Arthur returned home three weeks later.

His room was still in the same colors, but one thing had changed: the left pillow lay on an empty shelf. We no longer needed it for hiding. I kept the brass key.

Nathan temporarily handed the management of the house over to professionals and sat with his father every day. Once, at seven in the morning, he brought me coffee.

“I no longer want you to work here as a maid,” he told me.

“Then how?”

“As an administrator. At Arthur’s foundation. With a salary, vacation, and a contract in which everything is written.”

I laughed.

“At last, you trust official papers?”

“Now I know why they are necessary.”

Arthur looked at us from the window.

“Maria, you are my family.”

I took his hand. This time he pronounced my name correctly.

Victoria and Elliot appeared before the court. Victoria confessed to the crime as part of a deal, while Elliot denied everything to the end. In the end, both were sentenced, but I did not smile at a single hearing.

Someone’s fall could not build my life.

My life began in another way.

Four months later, I rented a small apartment in Queens, closer to my mother. In the mornings I went to the foundation office. In the evenings I visited Arthur. On Sundays I bought mandarins at the market because their smell reminded him of his youth.

Nathan often came to his father, but now he knocked on the door and waited for an answer.

One snowy morning Arthur showed me a drawing by a little girl. He did not yet have a granddaughter, so the drawing was from my niece: a house, three people, and a big yellow sun.

“This is you,” Arthur told me.

“Why do I have such a big head?”

“Because you are smart.”

“And you?”

“I am sitting by the window.”

“Where is Nathan?”

Arthur smiled calmly.

“Outside. He has learned to knock on the door for the first time.”

A few weeks later I received a letter from Victoria. The envelope was plain, but I recognized her handwriting immediately.

“Maria, I know that you are not obliged to answer me. I only want to speak with you once. I will no longer ask Nathan to return. I want you, at least, to know that I did not do everything only for money. I was afraid that I would again be no one.”

I read the letter to the end.

Then I folded it.

Nathan, who was standing by the window, asked me:

“Do you want us to throw it away?”

“No.”

“Will you write an answer?”

“Yes.”

On the paper I wrote only one sentence:

“I understand your fear, but I am no longer going to correct it for you.”

This was my quiet refusal.

I did not send the letter to her home. I gave it to the lawyer so that he could deliver it officially. I no longer wanted her words to be able to come to my door.

That evening I put Arthur’s old room in order. On the shelf still lay the pillow inside which everything had been hidden. The golden initials had already faded. I stitched the seam with red thread, so that it would never open again.

I put the brass key under the pillow.

Not for a secret.

For memory.

Outside the window, the first snow was falling. White flakes covered the trace that Elliot had left in the yard that night.

I stroked the pillow and turned off the light.

This time nothing was hidden in the house.