The Billionaire Didn't Know His Maid Was His Wife · Mira Lang

Chapter 2: The Study on the Second Floor

I had been trying to get into that study for four weeks.

It is the only room in the house that is locked when the family is out, and Mrs. Dunbar cleans it herself on Mondays, and I had been in it exactly once, for ninety seconds, holding a vase.

At six o'clock on the fourth Friday, Callum Ardent opened the door and said, "Come in, sit anywhere," and went back to a phone call about a shipping contract, and I sat down eight feet from the safe with a notebook on my knee.

It's behind the lower panel of the bookcase on the north wall. Dennis had described it exactly: a Chubb, 1970s, keypad retrofitted in the nineties, the kind of thing a certain sort of family buys once and then treats as furniture.

"Sorry." He put the phone face-down. "Right. Ninety people."

"Ninety-four, sir, if the Hollands bring their daughters."

"You've read the list?"

"Mrs. Dunbar gave it to me at lunch. There are two vegetarians, one shellfish allergy, and Mr. Ardent senior's assistant has asked for a table plan by Tuesday."

He looked at me properly for the first time.

I made myself look back at exactly the level a housekeeper looks at an employer, which is the eyebrows, and not the eyes.

"How long have you been here?" he said.

"Four weeks."

"And you've read the guest list, the dietary file, and clearly the seating chart, in four weeks, for a dinner you were given ninety minutes ago."

"I read them at lunch, sir."

"Right," he said again, slowly. "Well. That's — good, actually. Yes."

We worked for two hours.

I'm going to be honest about what happened in those two hours, because it is the beginning of everything that went wrong afterwards.

He was good at it. Not the food — he had no opinions about the food — but the people. He knew which two men could not be seated within earshot of each other because of a lawsuit in 2019, and which aunt would drink, and which junior partner needed to be placed somewhere he'd be noticed by somebody who could help him. He did it fast, and without malice, and twice he said "no, that's cruel, move him back" about a seating decision he'd made himself.

At eight o'clock he pushed his chair back and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"Can I ask you something, Miss Marsh?"

"Sir."

"Does ninety-four people in a garden sound like a good evening to you?"

"It sounds like an expensive one, sir."

He laughed — one short breath through the nose — and I understood, with a sinking feeling I did not enjoy at all, that the man was profoundly lonely in his own house.

* * *

I did not get into the safe that night, or the next week, or the one after.

What I got instead was a routine: six o'clock, the study, the notebook. Ninety-four became a hundred and six. The florist changed twice. Sabine came once, sat on the arm of his chair for eleven minutes, said, "Darling, you're doing staffing?" and left for a private view.

And on the Thursday of the second week, at twenty past six, with the rain coming down the study windows, he said:

"You should know there's a complication with the wedding date. It may move."

My pen stopped.

"Sir?"

"There's a legal matter." He was looking out the window, not at me. "Family thing. Old paperwork that should have been dealt with years ago and wasn't."

"Should I hold the deposits?"

"No — the dinner's fine, the dinner goes ahead." He turned around. "Do you know, I've been trying to say this out loud to somebody for a week and there is genuinely nobody in my life I can say it to. Isn't that remarkable."

"Sir, I don't think you should—"

"I'm still married," Callum said.

The rain went down the window.

"When I was twenty-five," he said, "my grandfather's trust required me to be married before twenty-six or the company went to my father outright. My father had spent four years running one of our subsidiaries into the ground and I had the numbers to prove it and no way to stop him. So I paid a young woman eighty thousand dollars to sign a certificate, and the family lawyer undertook to file the dissolution two years later, and I signed my half and never thought about it again."

He picked a paperweight up off the desk and put it down.

"It was never filed," he said. "Sabine's lawyers found it in June. Six years. I have been legally married to a stranger for six years and I did not know."

I made my hands stay still on the notebook.

"Can it not simply be filed now, sir?"

"It could, if anyone could find her." He said it lightly, and there was nothing light in it. "Junie Calloway. Twenty-two years old in the photograph on the licence. No living family, no forwarding address, no social media in that name since 2019. Hurst's firm has no file — the whole thing was handled off-book because my father insisted, and now Hurst is retired in Portugal and won't take calls."

"And if she can't be found?"

"Then in about four months I file for dissolution by publication, which means a legal notice in three newspapers announcing that Callum Ardent has misplaced a wife." He smiled without any humour at all. "My father will enjoy that enormously. He has been waiting six years for something like this."

I looked down at the notebook, where I had written napkins — ivory or oyster? in my own handwriting, and I could not feel my hands.

"Do you remember her?" I said.

I have gone over that question a thousand times since. I don't know why I asked it. I think I wanted him to say no.

Callum was quiet for long enough that I looked up.

"Yes," he said. "She was very young and completely composed and she told me her father died owing three hundred and eleven thousand dollars, in a voice like she was reading out a football score, and she was the only honest person in that room including me." He turned the paperweight again. "I've thought about her perhaps twice a year for six years. Which is a strange thing to say about a person you spent eleven minutes with."

The clock on the study mantel ticked.

"I hope she's all right," he said. "That's all. I don't want anything from her. I'd just rather not do it by newspaper notice, as if she were a lost dog."

* * *

Two things happened after that.

The first is that I got into the safe.

He gave me the combination himself, on the last Tuesday in August, for the most ordinary reason in the world: the dinner deposits were in cash, and Mrs. Dunbar was in hospital, and he was in Rotterdam.

"Bookcase, north wall, lower panel. Nine-two-eight-four, then the handle down. Take the envelope marked florist, leave the rest, and don't tell my father I gave you the number."

I stood in that study at half past nine at night with my hand on the panel and my heart going so hard I could hear it.

Inside: cash envelopes. Two passports. A pistol I did not touch. A stack of leather folders.

And at the bottom, under everything, a book bound in blue cloth with the corner of the cover worn white, the way a book gets when a man carries it under his arm for a decade.

RECONCILIATIONS — M. CALLOWAY.

The second thing happened as I was closing the panel.

The study door opened, and Sabine Cortez-Ward stood in it with her coat still on, and looked at the safe, and looked at me.

"Well," she said. "You're the housekeeper."