I tucked it away behind everything else and kept it there, where it couldn't move around.
The driver opened my door before I could do it myself. He retrieved my bag from the trunk with the same careful efficiency as before and carried it toward the front steps without being asked. I followed.
The front door opened before we reached it.
The man who appeared in the doorway was perhaps sixty, slight, with the bearing of someone who had decided veryearly in life that dignity was non-negotiable and had never revisited that decision. He was wearing dark trousers and a gray sweater that was somehow neither casual nor formal, the precise midpoint between the two, achieved, I suspected, through decades of practice.
"Miss Callahan." He spoke with the faint trace of an accent I couldn't immediately place, French, maybe, or something adjacent to it. "Welcome. I'm Henri. I manage the household."
"Thank you."
He stepped back to allow me inside, and I crossed the threshold into the Moreau house.
The entry hall was high-ceilinged and cool, which was the first surprise, outside had been warm in the way of a city that stored heat in its stones, and I'd expected the same inside, but the house was precisely temperature-controlled to something approaching comfortable. Dark hardwood floors. A staircase curving up to the right, wide enough to drive something through. A chandelier that was old and lit and not trying to be anything other than what it was.
On the walls: paintings. Not prints, not decorative reproductions, paintings, oil on canvas, the kind that had acquired a certain density from being looked at over many years. I didn't know enough to name them, but I knew enough to recognize that they hadn't been purchased all at once from somewhere that sold ambiance by the room.
I made a note of the exits: front door behind me, a hallway to the left that likely led to the back of the house, a door under the staircase that might be a coat closet or might not be. I'd verify later.
"Mr. Moreau sends his apologies," Henri said, leading me toward the staircase at a pace that suggested the house was large enough to warrant efficiency. "He had a prior engagement thisafternoon and was unable to be here to receive you. He expects to return this evening."
"That's fine."
It was fine. It was, if anything, useful, time to establish the geography before Dominic Moreau was part of it.
"Dinner is at seven, if you'd like to join. It's not required." He said it without inflection, the way you stated options without attaching preference to them. "There's also the kitchen, which you're welcome to use at any hour. Estelle will be there until nine most evenings if you need anything prepared."
"I can cook for myself."
A pause, barely perceptible. "Of course."
We went up the staircase. The second floor had a long corridor, doors on both sides, the kind of hallway that was designed to impress its own length upon you. Henri led me past three of them and stopped at the fourth.
"Your room," he said, and opened the door.
I had prepared myself, on the drive, for a certain kind of room. Something calculated, nice enough to suggest I was being treated well, not so nice as to suggest I was valued. A room that said you are a guest without quite saying you are welcome. That was what I'd expected. That was the rational choice, the strategic one, and Dominic Moreau seemed like a man who made strategic choices.
What I was not prepared for was a room that was simply, without apparent strategy, beautiful.
High ceilings again. Two windows overlooking the side garden, both tall, both fitted with curtains in a heavy cream fabric that had been pulled open to let in the afternoon light. A bed that was wide and high and made up with the kind of care that happened when someone gave the task to a person who took it seriously. A writing desk in the corner, actual wood, actual age,with a lamp that cast a circle of warm light even in the afternoon. A bookshelf, empty, waiting.
The bookshelf stopped me.
It was a detail that shouldn't have mattered. It was furniture. But an empty bookshelf in a guest room, in a room where no one was expected to stay long enough to fill it, was either an oversight or a statement, and Dominic Moreau did not strike me as a man given to oversights.
"The bathroom is through there," Henri said, indicating a door to the left. "If you need anything at all, there's a number on the desk. And Mr. Moreau asked me to tell you..." He paused, precisely, in the way of someone who was relaying information word for word and wanted to be accurate. "that the books go where you put them."
I looked at him.
"His words," Henri said, with the perfect neutrality of a man who relayed messages without interpreting them.
"Thank you, Henri."
He inclined his head and left, pulling the door quietly shut behind him.
* * *
I put my bag on the chair by the desk, not the bed, not yet, the bed felt like a commitment, and walked to the windows.