as long as she was alive, I had a feeling if I just saw her in person...it would somehow absolve me.
“Where did you send her?”
“Wherever she wanted to go,” Dario shrugged. “I put her in a cart and off she went. I don’t know where.”
“Bull shit!” I fumed. “I demand to know where she is! I demand to see her!”
His eyes flickered with part surprise, part fear. “Why do you need to see her!? She’s not our concern now! She was innocent, and the best way to make her feel safe so she wouldn’t press charges against you for how you treated her, was to let her go! Beyond that, we have no business with her.”
“She’s always finding some way to make a fool out of me,” I muttered to myself, manically pacing the halls. “If I do ever see her again, I’ll make her pay for this.”
“She always thought she was too good for this job,” Jorge huffed. “I don’t know where she got off being so high and mighty when she was in no position to.”
Dario shook his head in exasperation as his voice grew shrill. “You’ve both lost your minds! That poor girl did nothing to you! She came here and worked hard, did everything we asked. She tolerated shitty treatment and even your accusing her of trying to murder her own patient! She ran off into the night and we’ll never hear from her again. You got off easy, Leonardo! And yet, somehow you’re still swearing vengeance on the poor girl who's done absolutely nothing wrong! Except maybe show you a little too much mercy.”
I stopped listening to Dario halfway through his rant. I didn’t care what the hell he had to say about any of this. I was all out of sorts and wanted to be alone. Even Jorge’s little bird-like responses, always agreeing with me, were starting to get on my nerves. I turned to storm off in the opposite direction. Dario gave up with a wave of his hand, but Jorge attempted to follow me.
“No!” I snapped at him. “Just let me be!”
“We will have to figure out what to tell Donña Angela before she returns!” Dario reminded me before storming off in the opposite direction.
That time, I waved him away. I was very well aware of that. I didn’t know who he was always trying to act so authoritatively while he was younger than me and even younger than Jorge. He had no right to take this matter into his own hands. Everything would have been different if I could have seen before she left, though I really didn’t know how or why.
That was beside the point. I was the man of the house, especially with everyone else gone. And he should have never acted without my approval. He shouldn’t have even been sniffing around in Greta’s room without asking me first, though I guess I was glad he did get her handed over to the police. He was right. I probably would have flown into a rage and killed her.
But then I wondered...Why hadn’t I treated Lucia the same? Was it because there was no proof or because Greta could have confessed and saved us all the trouble of a wrongful accusation? It was all so confusing, and I felt a storm of conflicting emotions rising up inside. First off, I was almost never wrong about anything. No, actually. I never had been wrong before, especially not with proof to show just how wrong I was. Second, I never felt sorry for anyone. It wasn’t like me to go easy on anyone, regardless of their age or if they were a man or a woman.
Which is what made what I did next even more puzzling. Once Jorge had ran off into our basement parlor to decompress and Dario had busied himself with a staff meeting to organize around the missing employees, I found myself sneaking into Lucia’s room.
Dario must have sent her off in a hurry because all of her things were still there. Her nightgown from her last night spent in this room was thrown across the bed, and I couldn’t resist trailing my fingers across it. That somehow turned into me clutching it in my fingers, and before I knew it I had raised it up to my face. My nostrils flared as I breathed its scent in and out.
For all the times I had chastised her while she worked, I had grown familiar with her scent of cinnamon