“She got sick.”
“How sick?”
Mia’s mouth trembled.
“She said it was just cold.”
“Where is she?”
“In the laundry room.”
Adrian turned toward the door.
Mia rushed forward two steps.
“Please!”
He stopped.
“She said she had to finish.”
“Who said?”
“Mama.”
“No.”
“Who told your mother she had to work tonight?”
Mia looked frightened by the question.
“Miss Kettering.”
Adrian knew the name.
Natalie Kettering.
Regional supervisor for Belgrave Residential Services.
The woman who sent monthly staffing reports.
Mia whispered:
“She told Mama if she missed again, they’d give the house to somebody else.”
Adrian’s face hardened.
“Missed again?”
“Mama missed when Lily had fever.”
The baby slept against Mia’s back.
Mia continued quickly:
“She said rich houses don’t pay for excuses.”
Adrian felt anger move through him with remarkable clarity.
Not at Grace.
Not at Mia.
Not even yet at Kettering, because he needed facts.
Mostly at himself.
This was happening inside his house.
Under contracts he approved.
Through vendors whose reports he received.
Eight years.
And a six-year-old believed the difference between having a home and losing one was whether she could vacuum his study before he returned.
Adrian stepped toward her.
Then remembered how she recoiled.
He stopped.
“We’re going downstairs.”
Mia’s eyes filled.
“Please let me finish.”
“No.”
“I can.”
“I know you can.”
That made her pause.
Adrian continued:
“You shouldn’t have to.”
Mia looked as though no adult had phrased it that way before.
She glanced toward the baby.
Then unexpectedly toward the library wall.
Not the door.
The wall.
Her expression changed.
Adrian noticed.
“What?”
Mia stared at the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves.
Nothing moved.
“Mia?”
She lowered her voice.
“Mr. Duca?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask something?”
“Anything.”
“Why does someone knock from inside there?”
Adrian followed her finger.
The western library wall.
Twelve feet high.
Custom walnut.
A rolling brass ladder.
Shelves filled with books his father collected and Adrian rarely opened.
His mother once called that wall the most expensive thing in the house nobody used.
Adrian looked back at Mia.
“What do you mean?”
“Knocking.”
“When?”
“At night.”
“How many times?”
Mia shrugged.
“Sometimes three.”
“Your mother heard it?”
“She says old houses make sounds.”
“They do.”
“But this one is a person.”
Adrian almost answered automatically.
There is no person behind that wall.
Then something in Mia’s face stopped him.
She was not telling a ghost story.
She was afraid.
“How do you know?”
“Because yesterday I knocked back.”
Adrian’s skin tightened.
“And?”
“It knocked back.”
He looked at the wall.
The house was built in 1823.
It had servant passages.
Sealed chimneys.
A dumbwaiter shaft that no longer functioned.
His father once mentioned a narrow corridor behind part of the library, built during a nineteenth-century renovation to let staff tend fireplaces without crossing entertaining rooms.
Adrian had never seen it.
He thought it had been sealed during the 1978 restoration.
“Mia.”
She raised one finger.