Carmen handles the guest briefings and the owner profiles are kept private and she doesn't know.
And right now she is in the kitchen smelling like strawberry and soft rose and comfort, the particular warm scent of someone who has found a place that agrees with them, and if I walk in there it stops being that.
I push off the wall.
I walk back around the path and down to the dock again and I sit on the edge of it with my feet over the water and I look at the horizon, which is doing excellent things in the sunset but is not receiving my full attention.
She's here for the season. Three months, hired to replace Daniel after he walked over the money, living in the staff quarters on the other side of the hill while I've been in the mainhouse for four days with forty meters and complete ignorance between us.
Forty meters.
Madonna.
I have to tell the rest of the pack.
Now!
Matteo is in the study. He is always in the study, it's where he goes when he is avoiding having feelings in any room that has chairs positioned for conversation. He has his reading glasses on and papers in front of him and he looks up when I come in with the specific expression of a man who has been doing productive work and is assessing whether whatever I'm about to say is worth interrupting it for.
Tomas is on the sofa with a book. He marks his page when he sees my face.
I close the door behind me.
"She's here," I say.
Matteo takes his glasses off.
Tomas closes the book.
The room is very quiet.
"The new chef," I say. "The one Carmen hired. The one who replaced Daniel." I look at both of them. "It's Jennifer."
Nobody speaks for a moment.
Tomas sets the book down on the cushion beside him with the measured care of a man whose hands need something to do.
Matteo's jaw tightens once. His tell. The only one he has.
"You're certain," Tomas says.
"I would know her trace in a thunderstorm," I say, and I say it without any of my usual performance because this is not the moment for performance, this is the moment for the truth of it, the plain version. "It's her. She's in the kitchen and she doesn't know we're here."
Matteo stands.
He walks to the window.
He stands there with his back to us looking at the dark garden, and I watch the line of his shoulders and wait, because I know Matteo, I have known Matteo for fifteen years, and when he has something to say he says it when he's ready and not a second before.
"She came here to work," he says finally.
"Yes," I say.
"She doesn't know."
"No."
He turns around. His pale eyes are doing the thing they do when he has already reached a conclusion and is now managing its implications. "We don't tell her tonight."