Chapter 3: What Walter Saw and Never Said
The ambulance took eleven minutes.
I know because Gideon counted.
I could hear him, somewhere above the pain, saying the numbers under his breath the way a man does when he needs something to hold onto.
He stayed beside me the entire time.
He did not pace.
He did not go back upstairs to deal with Sera.
He sat on the cold stone floor of his own kitchen in his bare feet and kept his eyes on my face.
"Stay awake," he said.
"I'm awake."
"Keep talking."
"About what?"
"Anything."
"Your sister," I said.
His jaw moved.
"Not that."
The paramedics were efficient and kind.
They splinted my wrist, pressed gauze against my temple, asked me questions I answered correctly.
Gideon answered the ones I couldn't.
He knew my full name, my agency, how long I had been employed at the mansion.
He knew I took the back stairs every morning at six because the medication room was closer to the kitchen entrance.
He had been paying attention.
That was the first thing that didn't fit the picture I had built of him.
At the hospital, they confirmed what I already knew.
Fractured wrist, mild concussion, four stitches above my left ear.
The doctor told me I was lucky the fall had been short.
Three steps from the bottom.
"If it had been higher up the staircase," he said, "we would be having a different conversation."
I didn't tell him that I always started at the top.
I had been moving fast that morning because Mr.
Marquetti's eight o'clock medication could not be late.
His cardiac schedule was precise.
I had the tray in both hands.
I had not looked down.
Whoever put the oil there knew exactly where I would be, and exactly why I could not stop myself from falling.
Gideon arrived at the hospital two hours after the ambulance.
He had dressed properly by then — dark jacket, collar buttoned — but he had not shaved, and his eyes had the flat, contained look of a man who had spent those two hours doing something that required complete control.
He sat in the chair beside my bed and said nothing for a moment.
"Walter talked," he said finally.
I waited.
"He saw Sera on the back staircase at five forty this morning.
He was coming up from the boiler room.
She was coming down.
She had nothing in her hands." He paused.
"He said he didn't think anything of it.
She told him she couldn't sleep."
"Did he believe her?"
Gideon looked at the window.
"He said he didn't look at the stairs after she passed.
He just went back to bed." Another pause.
"He's been with my family for twenty-two years.
He didn't want to see what he was seeing."
"But he saw it."
"Yes."
I shifted against the pillow.
My wrist throbbed inside the splint.
"What did Sera say when you spoke to her?"
Gideon's expression didn't change.
But his hand, resting on his knee, closed slowly into a fist.
"She said she was concerned.
She said she hoped I wasn't going to make something out of nothing.
She said the nurses before you had all left for their own reasons and perhaps this one simply wasn't careful on the stairs."
The word careful landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
"She used my name?" I asked.
"No," Gideon said.
"She called you this one."
I looked at the ceiling.
Four stitches.
A fractured wrist.
A medication tray scattered across stone.
This one.
"Mr.
Marquetti—"
"Gideon."
I stopped.
He was looking at me directly now.
"My name is Gideon.
You have been in my house for six weeks and you have called me Mr.
Marquetti every single time.
I would like you to stop."
I didn't know what to do with that.
"Gideon," I said.
He nodded once.
"I need to ask you something," he said.
"And I need you to answer me honestly."
"All right."
"The nurses before you.
Did any of them say anything to you before you took the position?
Through the agency, or otherwise?"
I thought about the woman I had replaced.
Patricia Holt.
Fifteen years of experience.
She had left a note in the agency file — not a formal report, just a handwritten line clipped to the intake form.
*The patient is not the problem.*
I had thought it was about Gideon.
His reputation.
The things people said about the Marquetti name.
Now I wasn't sure.
"One of them left a note," I said.
Gideon went very still.
"What did it say?"
I told him.
He stood up from the chair.
Walked to the window.
Stood there with his back to me for a long moment.
When he turned around, something in his face had shifted in a way I couldn't name.
"I need to show you something," he said.
May you like
"When you're discharged.
There's something in Sera's room that she doesn't know I've already found."
