“I’ll be brief. We no longer require your services.”
“I don’t understand. Your father said I would always have a place here.”
“My father is dead.”
His words struck harder than I expected. He pushed the envelope across the desk.
“There are four hundred dollars inside. One week of severance. More than most housekeepers would receive.”
“My position?”
“You are an employee, Marta, not family. I want you gone by sundown.”
Eighteen years of meals, medicine, lonely holidays, and late-night conversations had been reduced to four hundred dollars. I asked whether I could take the small radio I kept in the pantry. Julian said I could remove anything that truly belonged to me. Near the window hung a framed photograph of the mansion at sunset. Mr. Whitaker had given it to me years earlier.
“He told me I could have that picture.”
Julian barely looked at it.
“That cheap thing? Take it and leave.”
