I glance at her. There’s no sarcasm in her face. Just sincerity. Inside, someone laughs too loudly, and the sound jars.
“Have you worked for my father for a long time?” I ask.
“Fifteen years,” she says. She folds her hands tightly together in her lap. “I started when I was nineteen. I was just a member of the cleaning staff at first.”
“Nineteen?” I look at her properly now. “You practically grew up here.”
“Yes.” A small nod. “I did.”
“What was he like?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Not the public version. Not the myth. The man in his own home.”
Betty doesn’t answer me immediately. She watches a gust of wind scatter a lone, dead leaf across the lawn behind the flower beds.
“He was quieter at home,” she says at last. “Not softer. Just quieter. He’d come in late most nights. Always alone. Always carrying work with him. He’d put his keys in the bowl by the door exactly the same way every time. His shoes would be lined up perfectly beneath his jacket, which always went on the third hook, not the second.”
A faint, almost fond smile touches her mouth. “He liked order. He’d walk through the house as though he expected it to disappoint him. Checking things. Straightening things that didn’t need straightening.”
“Control. He liked to be in control,” I say, almost to myself.
“Yes.” She glances at me, surprised. “Yes, that exactly. But sometimes,” she adds more quietly. “Sometimes he would just stand in the library and stare at ...”
She trails off and glances at me.
“At what?”
“His photographs of you.”
The words land softly but hit hard. “He kept photographs of me?”
“He had many photographs of you,” Betty says with a nod. “School pictures. Newspaper clippings. The pictures of you with that famous Rembrandt you cleaned up for that exhibition in London when you were twenty-two.”
My throat goes dry.
“How did he even get that?”
“He had people,” she says simply.
Of course, he did.
“He’d stand there and look at them for a long time. Not touching. Just looking.”
Something presses against my ribs. “Did he ever talk about me?”
“Not to most people. To Axel, I think. And to me occasionally.”
“Why you?”
She hesitates. Really hesitates. “Because I was there when he’d had too much to drink and it all spilled out,” she says finally. “And because I didn’t repeat what I heard.”
There’s no arrogance in it. Just a fact, quietly stated.
“What did he say?” I ask, my voice quieter now.
Betty looks down at her hands. “He’d say he wondered if you still hated him. He’d say he didn’t know how to fix what he’d broken.” Her voice softens further. “He wasn’t very good at fixing personal things. Only companies.”
A bitter laugh slips out of me. “That tracks.”
She studies me carefully. “It’s not what you think.... He was afraid of you.”