Chapter 4: The Housekeeper's Move
Mrs.
Gable did not panic.
Panic was for people who had no contingency plan, and she had managed this estate long enough to have several.
She moved quickly once Nora's footsteps faded down the east wing corridor.
Back through the servants' passage, down the narrow back staircase, into the small private office adjacent to the kitchen that she had occupied for eleven years.
She closed the door.
Locked it.
Sat down at her desk and opened the bottom drawer.
Inside was a folder.
Thin but dense with documents — invoices, signed requisition forms, three years of household accounts with her signature at the bottom of every page.
She lifted the folder, held it for a moment, then placed it flat on the desk in front of her.
Her phone buzzed.
She glanced at the screen.
It was Carver — one of the senior bodyguards who had arrived with Lorenzo.
She answered immediately.
"Well?"
"He's still up there," Carver said.
"Been in the room for twenty minutes.
The girl left.
He's alone with the old man now."
"Did he take anything from the room?"
A pause.
"Can't confirm.
I wasn't inside."
"The note on the table.
Was it still there when they came out?"
"The girl came out.
Moretti didn't.
Not yet."
Mrs.
Gable exhaled slowly.
"Keep watching.
Tell me the moment he comes downstairs."
She ended the call.
Put the phone face-down.
She had known, on some level, that a moment like this might eventually come.
Lorenzo visited rarely, and when he did, he cared about two things: the security of the estate and the condition of his father.
She had always managed both with careful stagecraft.
The room was cleaned before visits.
Fresh food appeared.
A nurse was called in the week before any scheduled arrival.
But this visit had not been scheduled.
The blizzard had moved it up by four days.
She hadn't had time to reset the room.
Hadn't had time to remove the blanket that clearly hadn't come from estate supplies.
Hadn't had time to brief the staff.
And then there was the note.
She hadn't known he could write.
In five years, she had never seen him hold a pen.
She had genuinely believed the doctors — that his motor function above a minimal threshold was gone.
That anything left in that frail body was vestigial, automatic, not purposeful.
She had been wrong.
That much was now clear.
The question was what the note contained.
A knock at her office door.
She composed herself before speaking.
"Come."
It was Petra, one of the younger kitchen maids.
Her face was pale.
"Mrs.
Gable, Mr.
Moretti's head of security just came through the kitchen.
He asked the chef for the last three months of meal logs.
Said Mr.
Moretti wants to review them personally."
Mrs.
Gable's hands pressed flat on the desk.
"The meal logs."
"Yes, ma'am.
All of them.
Everything delivered upstairs, including the east wing."
Petra waited, unsure whether she was supposed to have said this, whether she was in trouble for delivering the news.
"That's fine," Mrs.
Gable said.
Her voice was smooth.
"Tell the chef to cooperate fully.
Mr.
Moretti is of course welcome to any records he needs."
Petra left.
Mrs.
Gable opened the folder again.
She found the east wing meal logs — her own handwriting on the allocation sheets.
Cold oatmeal categorized as standard dietary requirement for a patient with swallowing complications.
The notation had made it look medically justified.
It had been her own invention.
There was no doctor's recommendation behind it.
She removed those pages from the folder.
Folded them.
Slid them into her jacket.
Then she picked up her phone and dialed a number she rarely used.
It rang four times.
A man answered.
"It's me," she said.
"We may have a problem at the estate.
I need to know how exposed we are."
"How exposed?" the man repeated slowly.
"If someone were to review the east wing care records from the last five years," she said, keeping her voice level, "how much of that traces back to the original arrangement we made?"
Silence.
"All of it," he said.
"Every directive came through me.
The care reduction, the isolation, the restricted visitor access.
If he starts pulling threads—"
"He already has."
Another silence.
Longer.
"Then we need to move fast," the man said.
"There's someone else who needs to know about this.
Someone with more leverage than either of us."
"Who?"
The man said a name that made Mrs.
Gable close her eyes.
Brody.
She opened them again.
"He's here?"
"He never left the city.
He's been waiting.
He reached out to me last week — said he had information about the girl that could be useful if things got complicated."
The folder in front of her.
The meal logs in her jacket pocket.
May you like
The note that Lorenzo had folded and placed against his heart.
"Tell him," she said, "that things just got complicated."
