Dark promises

Chapter 5

Her room was larger than any space she'd ever called her own - pale walls, a window that looked over the gardens she hadn't known existed behind the house's stern front, a bed made up with linens that felt obscene against hands used for thrift - store sheets. She sat in the edge of it for a long time before she let herself lie down, half convinced that closing her eyes would dissolve the whole arrangement like something too good to have actually happened.

It didn't dissolve. Morning came through the curtains exactly as it had the night before, and by the time she made her way down to the kitchen. Matteo was already at the table swinging his legs, a workbook open in front of him that looked several grades ahead of what a four year old should be capable of doing.

"You're a nanny", He informed her, without looking up, "but papa says I don't need a nanny. I need a person who wouldn't be boring."

"High standards"

"The last one made me nap".He said the word nap the way other children might say something obscene." I don't nap. I have more work.

She glanced at the workbook - differential patterns, of all things, neatly half-finished in a child's careful handwriting.

"What kind of work?"

"Papa says the kind is a muscle. If you don't use it, it gets fat and lazy. " He looked up to her with sudden serious focus.

"Are you smart?"

"Smart enough to keep up with you, I think".

That seemed to satisfy him more than any other answer could have. He returned the workbook, and Elena found herself settling into the chair across from him without being asked, the two of them working in silence that felt, against every reasonable explanation, comfortable.

It became the routine, over the following days, a shape she could hold unto - the rhythm of it, at least.

Morning's with Matteo's lessons, small excursions through the gardens that Nero insisted on joining, unhurried and watchful under her heel. Afternoons where the house's other residents began, slowly to reveal their selves.

Dario, Rafeal's assistant, watched her with open suspicion he made no effort to disguise, always finding some reason to be present when she and Matteo crossed paths with anything resembling Rafeal's schedule. Marisol toured by degrees, offering advice about the household routines in a tone that suggested she'd decided, privately that Elena might last longer than the others.

Rafeal himself remained mostly a presence felt rather than seen - the sound of a car in the drive late at night, a light under his study door long after the rest of the house had gone dark, the occasional clipped instruction relayed through Alfonso rather than delivered directly. When their paths did cross, his attention had a way of settling on her that felt different from Dario's suspicion or Marisol assessment - quieter, and somehow harder to bear with it.

She caught him once,.in the second week standing at the edge of the garden while she and Matteo hunted for a ball Nero had stolen and refused to relinquish.

Rafeal hadn't announced himself. He'd simply been there watching, for long enough that she wondered how much of the afternoon he'd seen before she noticed him at all.

"You're good to him",he said when he finally met his eyes.

"He's easy to be good to."

"He isn't actually.

Ask any of the six nannies before you.

"Something almost humor moved through his expression before it was gone again. He likes you. That's not a small thing in this house."

"Is that a compliment, Mr Castellano?"

It's a observation.

"The same words he used on the sidewalk, and she wondered if he knew he repeated himself, or if it was simply the closest he came to honesty - stating things as facts so he never had to risk the vulnerability of an opinion.

He didn't watch the rest of the game. He turned and went back toward the house, and Elena stood there a moment longer than she needed to, aware of something she didn't yet have a name for settling quietly into a place - no quite trust, not yet anything close to warmth, but the first small crack in the wall she'd built to keep herself from being hurt again.

She told herself it meant nothing. She was, after all getting rather good at telling herself things that are quite true.