Chapter 1 - THE LAUGHTER BEHIND THE DOOR
The most feared man in Chicago stood outside his sister’s bedroom, afraid to turn the handle.
Sophia was laughing.
She hadn’t spoken in seven years.
Santiago Moretti had come home four hours early. Now he stared through a gap in her door, watching his nineteen-year-old sister sit cross-legged on the carpet.
Across from her knelt the new maid.
Ruby Brennan.
Their hands moved quickly. Sophia signed something. Ruby shook her head, made a face, and answered.
Sophia doubled over.
The laughter made no sound. Santiago remembered it anyway—the wrinkled nose, the shaking shoulders, the way she pressed her fingers against her mouth.
Then she noticed him.
Her smile disappeared.
Santiago stepped inside.
“What are you doing?”
Ruby stood. “Talking to your sister.”
“She understands you?”
“She understands everything.”
The answer hit harder than it should have.
For seven years, doctors had called Sophia withdrawn. Unreachable. Severely traumatized.
This woman had been cleaning his house for six weeks.
“How long?”
“Three weeks.”
“What does she tell you?”
Ruby glanced at Sophia.
“That’s between us.”
People who depended on Santiago Moretti for a paycheck did not usually refuse him.
“She’s my sister.”
“And she trusts me.”
He ordered Ruby downstairs.
In his study, she stood before his desk, twisting one trembling finger inside her apron pocket.
“She heard the doctors,” Ruby said. “She heard the staff deciding what she wanted. She heard you outside her bedroom at night.”
“We gave her a writing board.”
“And who writes back?”
He looked away first.
That made him furious.
“Your employment ends tonight.”
Ruby went still.
Then she turned toward the door.
“She likes green.”
“What?”
“Her sheets. Her curtains. Everyone buys blue. She hates blue.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I asked.”
She opened the door.
“No one else did.”
After she left, Santiago went upstairs.
Sophia sat on her bed with her writing board in her lap.
He stopped in the doorway.
“Is that true? About the green?”
She stared at him, then slowly turned the board around.
Four words covered the white surface.
YOU SENT HER AWAY.
Santiago stood there until she erased them.
Downstairs, he called Tomas, his head of security.
“The maid. Ruby Brennan. Find out who she is.”
“How deep?”
“Everything.”
Three days later, Tomas returned with a sixty-three-page file.
On the first page was a photograph of Ruby wearing hospital scrubs.
May you like
Beneath it was a different job title.
And beside the photograph was a little girl who had been dead for three years.
