ELLIOT
“She is gone.”
The housekeeper who answered the door at his mother’s house was young. A temporary hire. She looked at Elliot with the wide-eyed wariness of someone who understood she had walked into the middle of something that had been building long before she arrived.
“What do you mean gone,” Elliot said.
“Mrs. Voss gave her a month’s wages this morning and asked her to collect her things.” The girl shifted. “Rosa left about an hour ago. She did not say where she was going.”
Elliot looked past her into the entrance hall. Everything in his mother’s house was exactly as it had always been. Polished. Arranged. Beautiful in the cold particular way of spaces designed to impress rather than welcome. He had grown up inside this aesthetic and never once questioned it.
He questioned
