Elena showed up at nine on the dot. Not early, not late, exactly nine. And I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did. She just struck me as the type of person who’d been showing up on time for rich people her whole life. She was small, maybe mid-fifties, hair scraped back into this bun that looked like it would survive a hurricane, and she had these sharp eyes that didn’t miss a thing.
I was in the kitchen, still messing with Adrian’s coffee machine, which honestly might as well have been a spaceship. Buttons everywhere, little blinking lights, steam hissing like it was angry at me. I was pretty sure I’d already broken it. That’s when she walked in, saw me standing there like I was about to cry over an espresso machine, and didn’t even flinch.
“Mrs. Cross,” she said. Like the name b
