Part 2
“Maybe no one ever made him choose,” Nora said.
Rocco’s paw remained on her slipper. Julian looked down at it, then back at her. The hurt that crossed his face was so brief another person might have mistaken it for irritation.
“May I come in?” he asked.
The question surprised her more than the black sedan outside. Dean had treated a closed door as a personal accusation, even after their divorce. Julian DeLuca, who could make grown men leave restaurants before their food arrived, waited on a crooked porch for the permission of his new housekeeper.
Nora opened the door wider. “Wipe your shoes.”
He did.
The cottage made him look too large. His shoulders nearly filled the doorway; his coat cost more than everything in Nora’s closet. He stayed near the mat while his gaze passed over the secondhand table, the chipped blue kettle, and the veterinary books stacked beside an armchair. Nora saw the room through his eyes and resented herself for caring.
“This is inappropriate,” he said.
“Agreed. He’s covering most of the rug.”
“Rocco sleeps in the main house.”
“Rocco appears to have revised the arrangement.”
Julian called him once more. The dog rolled onto one side, exposing the towel twisted beneath his neck.
“He needs his anti-inflammatory with dinner,” Julian said.
“Bring it.”
His gaze narrowed. “You expect him to stay?”
“I expect him to decide whether he stays. Those aren’t the same thing.”
Delia arrived with Rocco’s medication, a bowl of food, and the composed face of a woman storing up a story for the entire kitchen. The dog ate only after Nora set the bowl beside the hearth. When Julian tried him again, Rocco faced the wall.
“This is becoming insulting,” Julian said.
“He’s had a difficult day.”
“He slept through most of it.”
“Emotionally difficult.”
Julian removed his coat, perhaps because surrendering to a chair seemed less humiliating than losing another argument to a dog. Nora reheated tomato soup without offering him any. Men like Julian did not eat three-day-old soup from mismatched bowls. Then his stomach growled.
He looked offended by the betrayal.
“There’s enough,” Nora said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“That sounded like a second opinion.”
She set a bowl before him with a heel of toasted bread. Julian examined the soup as if it might contain a negotiating position.
“What’s in it?”
“Tomatoes, onions, garlic, basil, and what was left of my patience after the courtyard.”
He tasted it. Then he ate all of it.
Rocco slept between them. The four notes Nora had hummed in the laundry room kept circling quietly in her head, though for once Dean’s voice did not push between them.
Julian left close to ten. Rocco stayed.
At five the next morning, Nora woke to a crunch from the kitchen. She reached for the heavy flashlight beside her bed and stood listening, her heart already inventing Dean with his old spare key and his patient explanation of why anything he took had belonged to him first. Another crunch.
She crept into the kitchen and found Rocco beside the counter with half a loaf of bread in his mouth. Crumbs covered the floor.
“You have a private cook.”
Rocco chewed.
“That was supposed to last three days.”
His eyes traveled to the other half.
“Don’t.”
He took it and returned to the fire. Nora laughed before she could stop herself. The sound startled her almost as much as it did the dog.
At seven, Julian knocked with a paper bag from the main kitchen. It held two loaves, fruit, cheese, and coffee whose price Nora recognized because she had once put it back on a grocery shelf. She removed one loaf and returned the bag.
“Why?” he asked.
“I lost one loaf, not a farmer’s market.”
“Rocco inconvenienced you.”
“Your payroll already compensates me for inconvenience.”
“Not this kind.”
“Then the bread settles it.”
He took back the bag with the expression of a man encountering a law he had not written. When his eyes dropped to the flap of rubber hanging from her shoe, Nora tucked the foot beneath her chair.
“That’s why you fell.”
“The ice made a substantial contribution.”
“You need new shoes.”
“Do not buy me shoes.”
“I did not say I would.”
“Your face did.”
For the first time, Julian laughed in front of her. It was one short, surprised breath, but it stayed in the room after he left.
Rocco developed a routine. He slept at Nora’s cottage, escorted her to the service entrance, spent his afternoons near the laundry, and returned with her at dusk. Julian attempted a leather lead on the third evening. Rocco carried it inside and dropped it in the wood basket. On the fourth, Julian sent roast beef with his security chief. Rocco ate the beef and remained by Nora’s chair.
By the second week, Julian had begun walking the path with them. He spoke first about Rocco’s hip, then about the household accounts, and eventually about nothing that needed saying. He came in for coffee. He stayed for soup. He always knocked, even when the door stood open.
Nora’s clumsiness did not vanish. She caught a sleeve on a pantry latch when three staff members were watching. A teaspoon flew from her hand when Julian entered a room behind her without warning. During a lunch for two businessmen from Chicago, laughter burst at the wrong moment and a coffee cup rattled against its saucer.
But Julian began to notice what did not fall. Nora’s hands stayed steady when she measured Rocco’s medicine. She caught a kitchen worker’s wrist beneath cold water after a steam burn and remembered his adhesive allergy before anyone reached for a bandage. She could look at a linen shelf once and tell Delia how many bath sheets were missing.
Julian found her one afternoon in the storeroom with a spiral notebook open on a crate.
“Two hundred eighty-six bath towels,” she said. “The invoice says three hundred twelve. Twenty-one kitchen towels should have been retired last month, and this detergent lot is making three people’s hands crack.”
He took the notebook. Every page held dates, counts, stains, repairs, and small notes about the staff who used the supplies. “You started this on your second day.”
“Laundry tells on a house.”
“Why didn’t Delia see the invoice?”
“She manages fifty-eight people and two buildings. She can’t count every towel.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“I did. The assistant steward suggested I master carrying a tray before auditing the property.”
Julian’s face closed. “His name.”
“No.”
“Nora.”
“Correct the invoice and order gloves for the staff. Don’t fire a man because he embarrassed me.”
“That was not my question.”
“It was the next decision on your face.”
He looked at her for several seconds. “What do you want?”
Nora picked at the edge of a bandage on her thumb. The true answer felt too large for a storeroom. “A job where one dropped cup doesn’t cancel everything I did before it.”
“You have one.”
The next morning, he offered her a second, separately paid position: three hours a day coordinating Rocco’s low-stress care and helping Delia with household inventory. Nora asked for the terms in writing.
“You don’t trust me,” Julian said.
They stood in his study, a room of dark oak, locked drawers, and windows facing the frozen lake. On the wall behind him hung a map of Chicago marked with property holdings Nora did not ask about.
“I trust paper when powerful people are in a good mood,” she said. “It remains paper when their mood changes.”
“Mine rarely does.”
“That is what every powerful person thinks.”
He opened a drawer, removed a blank agreement, and pushed it across the desk. “Write terms you can trust.”
Nora did. Her hours would be fixed. She could refuse any handling method she believed would harm Rocco. No one would physically restrain him without medical necessity and a veterinarian present. Either party could end the work with seven days’ notice.
At the bottom she added: My personal life, communications, and movements will not be investigated or controlled unless I agree that an immediate safety threat exists. Julian read that sentence twice.
“You think I investigate everyone.”
“I think you are Julian DeLuca.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer this county would give.”
He picked up his pen. “Who decides what qualifies as an immediate threat?” Nora waited for him to name himself. Instead he drew a line through the final phrase and wrote: The parties will share relevant facts and decide together whenever circumstances permit. He signed beneath it. “If I decide for both of us,” he said, “your boundary is only decoration…”
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