By seven in the morning, my entire life fit into two suitcases.
I hadn’t packed them so much as thrown them together, grabbing whatever my hands landed on first: Lily’s stuffed rabbit, a week of clothes for both of us, the folder of paperwork I kept in case anything ever happened to me, the photo of my mother that I kept propped against the lamp on my nightstand. Marco stood in the doorway the entire time, silent, watching the hallway behind him instead of me, one hand never straying far from the inside of his jacket.
“You don’t have to guard us like we’re the ones who did something wrong,” I told him, zipping the second suitcase closed.
“Mr. Moretti’s orders,” Marco said, which wasn’t really an answer at all. “Anyone who comes near this hallway before I clear it, I stop them first and ask questions after.”
Lily sat on the bed with her rabbit clutched against her chest, watching us both with the particular calm she seemed to fall into whenever the adults around her were frightened. She had always been like that, even as a baby. Storms didn’t wake her. Sirens didn’t wake her. It was only ever the small things, the quiet things, that seemed to catch her attention and hold it.
The private residence occupied the entire third floor of the east wing, a part of the house I had cleaned exactly twice in six years, both times under direct supervision, both times feeling as though I were trespassing in a museum rather than doing my job. The elevator required a keycard I had never been issued. Dominic issued me one himself, pressing it into my palm without a word, his eyes tired and unreadable.
Our new rooms were larger than my entire apartment had been. A window seat overlooked the back gardens. There was a second, smaller bedroom for Lily, done in soft yellow, which Dominic mentioned almost apologetically had been decorated years ago for a niece who visited twice a year and had since outgrown the color.
“You don’t have to make excuses for it,” I told him. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’m not making excuses.” He said it too quickly, and for just a moment he looked almost embarrassed, an expression so unfamiliar on his face that I nearly missed it entirely. “I’m explaining why there’s a unicorn painted on the wall.”
Lily, from the doorway, pointed immediately at the unicorn and declared it the best thing she had ever seen in her entire life, which at three years old covered a grand total of maybe two years of memories, but the sentiment was clear enough.
By nine, the eleven missing minutes of footage had become the only thing anyone in the house was talking about, in the hushed, careful way people talk about something they’re afraid will get them fired, or worse, simply for mentioning it.
I found this out because Dominic told me himself, standing in the doorway of what had apparently once been his late wife’s private study, now converted into something closer to a war room. Three monitors glowed against the far wall. A whiteboard held a rough timeline of the previous night, written in a security officer’s blocky handwriting. Ethan’s name was circled twice near the top.
“The system logs every camera continuously,” Dominic said, without turning around from the monitors. “Eleven minutes, one camera, gone completely. Not glitched. Not obscured. Deleted, and deleted well enough that our people can’t recover it.”
“Someone with access,” I said.
“Someone with a great deal of access.” He finally turned to face me, arms crossed, his shirt the same one from the night before, unchanged, unslept in. “The kind of access that isn’t given to caterers, or to musicians, or to a security contractor hired for one night.”
“You think it was someone from inside.”
“I think,” he said slowly, choosing each word the way a man chooses which stone to step on when crossing a river, “that eleven minutes of footage doesn’t disappear from a system I paid six figures to make un-hackable, unless the person who deleted it already had the keys.”
I felt something cold settle over me. “Who has keys like that?”
Dominic didn’t answer right away. Instead, he crossed to the whiteboard and tapped a small cluster of names written near the bottom, names I recognized instantly because I had worked alongside some of them for years.
Marco.
The estate’s head of IT, a quiet man named Felix who I had exchanged maybe fifty words with in six years.
And, circled at the very bottom in red, a name that made my stomach turn over.
Richard Voss. Dominic’s business partner of almost fifteen years. Ethan’s godfather. The man who had stood at the podium not twelve hours earlier and made a toast about watching Ethan grow up, about how proud he was to call this family his own.
“You can’t seriously think—”
“I don’t think anything yet.” Dominic’s voice was flat, controlled in a way that told me exactly how much effort it was costing him to keep it that way. “I’m looking at a list of people who could have done it. That’s all a list like this is ever good for, in the beginning. Not answers. Just a smaller pile of questions.”
There was a knock at the door, three soft raps, the same rhythm Dominic himself had used outside my apartment hours earlier. A young woman I recognized as one of his personal assistants stepped inside, glancing nervously between the two of us before addressing Dominic directly.
“Sir, Mr. Voss is downstairs. He’s asking to see Ethan.”
Something flickered across Dominic’s face, gone before I could name it.
“Tell him Ethan’s resting.”
“He says it’s urgent. He says—” She hesitated, clearly uncomfortable relaying the message. “He says he heard what happened, and he wants to help however he can.”
Dominic was quiet for a long moment, staring at the whiteboard, at the red circle around his oldest friend’s name.
“Let him in,” he said finally. “And Sarah—have Marco stand outside the room the entire time. Not near the door. Inside it.”
The assistant’s eyes widened slightly, but she nodded and left without another word.
I should have gone back upstairs then. It wasn’t my business, and I knew it wasn’t my business, and every instinct built over six years of careful invisibility told me to disappear back into the private residence and stay there until someone told me otherwise.
Instead, I found myself asking, “Do you want me to keep Lily away from him? If he comes near her—”
“He won’t get near her.” Dominic’s eyes met mine, steady now, some of the exhaustion burning off into something harder underneath. “Nobody gets near her again. Not until I know who I’m looking for.”
“And if it’s him?” I asked quietly. “If it’s Voss?”
Dominic didn’t answer for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped to something almost too quiet to hear.
“Then fifteen years of trust just became the most expensive mistake of my life. And I will not make it twice.”
Down the hall, faintly, I heard Lily’s laughter drifting from the yellow bedroom, bright and completely unaware of everything unfolding two floors below her. For a moment, standing there in the doorway of a dead woman’s study, surrounded by monitors and a whiteboard full of suspects, that sound was the only thing that felt real.
I didn’t yet know that within the week, that laughter would be the thing Dominic Moretti held onto every time the walls of his own house started closing in around him—or that the eleven missing minutes of footage were only the first secret his family had been keeping, and very far from the last.
