3 days after the envelope arrived, two men in dark suits came to the back entrance of the house.
They did not come to the front. They spoke to the gate man, he who called the house, and Derek came down and went outside to meet them near the garden wall.
They stood there for close to 30 minutes. Roselene watched from the laundry window. She could not hear any words.
She watched the way Derrick stood, the way tension lives in the shoulders of a man receiving information he does not want.
When he came back inside, he walked through the hallway without seeing Roselene. Not the deliberate way Petra looked through her.
He genuinely did not see her. He was somewhere far inside his own thoughts. He went back upstairs and the house went quiet again.
Roselene returned to the laundry. She folded shirts and pressed fabric and let the house be whatever it needed to be, moving around her quietly while she did the only work that was hers to do.
That night, voices came through the walls. On the house was old and large and sound moved through it in the late hours when everything else was silent.
Roselene heard Derek’s voice first, low and controlled, then Petra’s faster and sharper. She heard the word account repeated.
She heard contract. She heard something about a company name that she could not quite catch through the wall.
And then she heard Petra say very clearly and firmly, “You have no proof of anything.”
Then silence. Roselene pressed her pillow over her ears and told herself firmly that none of this was her business.
She was there to cook and clean and be invisible. Whatever was happening between two married people in the rooms above her had nothing to do with her.
She told herself this three times before sleep finally came thin and uneasy. Uh she woke before her alarm and lay in the dark for a while listening to the house breathe around her.
The next morning, she cleaned the ground floor rooms and then moved to the private study on the second floor.
Petra was at a full day of council meetings. Derek had left early for a site visit.
She entered the study with her cloth and bucket and worked from left to right along the walls the way she always did.
She was wiping the base of the tall, dark bookshelf when she noticed the gap at the bottom where something had fallen behind it.
A folder, thick brown, tied with black string. It must have slid off the shelf and fallen flat a while ago because there was dust on the back of it.
