Mr.
Arriaga crouched several feet in front of her.
He did not reach for her.
Perhaps he had finally noticed the way she watched adult hands.
“Sophia,” he said, “look at me.”
She raised her eyes slowly.
“Has this happened before?”
Patricia inhaled sharply.
“Do not interrogate her.
She is exhausted.”
Mr.
Arriaga held up one hand without turning around.
Patricia stopped speaking.
Sophia looked from her mother to her father.
Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
Then Diego whispered, “She said you would send us away.”
His voice was so small that I nearly missed it.
Mr.
Arriaga turned toward him.
“Who said that?”
Diego pressed the car against his chest again.
“Mom.”
Patricia’s face flushed.
“He is five.
He invents things when he is upset.”
Diego shook his head violently.
“She said if we told you, you would get new children who behaved.”
Sophia began crying.
Unlike Diego, she made a sound—a broken gasp that seemed to have been trapped inside her for months.
“She said you already thought we were bad,” Sophia said.
“She said that was why you stayed at work.”
Something changed in Mr.
Arriaga’s face then.
Until that moment, he had looked like the man everyone in the estate feared: controlled, distant, and impossible to read.
Now he looked like a father discovering that his own silence had been used as a weapon against his children.
He stood slowly.
“How long?” he asked Patricia.
She folded her arms.
“I will not stand here and be accused by children and an employee.
You travel constantly.
You leave me to manage everything, and then you walk in during one difficult moment and pretend to understand this family.”
Her voice grew stronger as she spoke.
She had found the argument she believed would protect her.
“You needed me to keep this house respectable.
You needed me at dinners, at benefits, in front of clients.
Do you know what people will say if you humiliate me because a maid overreacted?”
Mr.
Arriaga looked at his phone again.
“I am beginning to understand how certain you were that appearances mattered more to me than my children.”
Patricia’s posture stiffened.
“That is not what I said.”
“It is what you counted on.”
He walked to a panel beside the study door and entered a code.
Several camera feeds appeared on a dark glass screen inside the study.
The hallway camera was only one of them.
There were recordings from the breakfast room, the kitchen entrance, the staircase, and the children’s playroom doorway.
