Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91887 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
I huff a quiet breath. “I didn’t actually defend myself.”
“Exactly.”
I glance at her. There’s no sarcasm in her face. Just sincerity. Inside, someone laughs too loudly, and the sound jars.
“Have you worked for my father for a long time?” I ask.
“Fifteen years,” she says. She folds her hands tightly together in her lap. “I started when I was nineteen. I was just a member of the cleaning staff at first.”
“Nineteen?” I look at her properly now. “You practically grew up here.”
“Yes.” A small nod. “I did.”
“What was he like?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Not the public version. Not the myth. The man in his own home.”
Betty doesn’t answer me immediately. She watches a gust of wind scatter a lone, dead leaf across the lawn behind the flower beds.
“He was quieter at home,” she says at last. “Not softer. Just quieter. He’d come in late most nights. Always alone. Always carrying work with him. He’d put his keys in the bowl by the door exactly the same way every time. His shoes would be lined up perfectly beneath his jacket, which always went on the third hook, not the second.”
A faint, almost fond smile touches her mouth. “He liked order. He’d walk through the house as though he expected it to disappoint him. Checking things. Straightening things that didn’t need straightening.”
“Control. He liked to be in control,” I say, almost to myself.
“Yes.” She glances at me, surprised. “Yes, that exactly. But sometimes,” she adds more quietly. “Sometimes he would just stand in the library and stare at ...”
She trails off and glances at me.
“At what?”
“His photographs of you.”
The words land softly but hit hard. “He kept photographs of me?”
“He had many photographs of you,” Betty says with a nod. “School pictures. Newspaper clippings. The pictures of you with that famous Rembrandt you cleaned up for that exhibition in London when you were twenty-two.”
My throat goes dry.
“How did he even get that?”
“He had people,” she says simply.
Of course, he did.
“He’d stand there and look at them for a long time. Not touching. Just looking.”
Something presses against my ribs. “Did he ever talk about me?”
“Not to most people. To Axel, I think. And to me occasionally.”
“Why you?”
She hesitates. Really hesitates. “Because I was there when he’d had too much to drink and it all spilled out,” she says finally. “And because I didn’t repeat what I heard.”
There’s no arrogance in it. Just a fact, quietly stated.
“What did he say?” I ask, my voice quieter now.
Betty looks down at her hands. “He’d say he wondered if you still hated him. He’d say he didn’t know how to fix what he’d broken.” Her voice softens further. “He wasn’t very good at fixing personal things. Only companies.”
A bitter laugh slips out of me. “That tracks.”
She studies me carefully. “It’s not what you think.... He was afraid of you.”
“What?”
“Oh no. Not of you harming him. He was afraid you would see through him and not want a thing to do with him.”
The wind lifts a strand of her red hair across her cheek, and she tucks it behind her ear.
“He once told me that you had inherited his eyes to look at, but they were your mother’s eyes in every sense of the word. That you looked at people as if you were assessing the truth in them.”
My chest aches unexpectedly.
“That’s ridiculous,” I say, but is it really? Even my career is based around studying, analyzing, assessing what I see.
“It frightened him,” she insists gently. “He liked controlling the narrative. He couldn’t control what you thought of him.”
A strained silence settles between us. Someone calls Betty’s name faintly from inside. She tries to stand, but I grab her wrist and tell her to ignore it. I make a mental note to take the blame if she gets in trouble for it later.
“What was he like when he was angry?” I ask.
She exhales slowly. “Cold. Quieter than ever.”
“No shouting?”
“No.” A shake of her head. “Shouting would have meant a loss of control. He never lost control.”
I think of the boardroom stories. The dismantling of arguments. Of course, he did.
“At his most frustrated,” she continues. “He would go very still. That’s how we knew when to leave him alone.”
“We?”
“The house staff.”
“And at his most tender?” I prompt carefully.
That soft reverence returns to her face. “There was no one like him. We had a groundskeeper, Mr. Alvarez. He had a stroke three years ago. It meant he couldn’t work anymore. Your father paid for his rehabilitation. All of it. And he continued his wages and left a provision in his trust that that payment would continue until the day Mr. Alvarez died. He told everyone it was a retention incentive restructure.”
Despite everything, I smile.
“He never told Mr. Alvarez it was him,” she says. “But he visited him in the hospital. Late at night. He sat by his bed and talked about the garden plans as if he’d be back any day.”