Morning light streamed through the tall arched windows of Harwood Manor, turning the polished floors to gold. I stood in the entrance hall arranging white lilies in the crystal vase that lived on the round table beneath the chandelier, snipping each stem at an angle the way Mr. Harwood had taught me years ago, so the water could travel up and the blooms would last the week.
Mr. Edmund Harwood had always insisted on fresh flowers. Every Monday, without fail, in every season, whether there were visitors coming or not.
“A house needs proof that someone still cares for it,” he used to say.
For eighteen years, I had replaced them every Monday morning. Eighteen years of lilies and irises and, in the deep of winter, whatever the florist in town could get that did not look tired. It had become a kind of small liturgy for me, the first thing I did each week, the quiet way I told the old house that another Monday had come and I was still there to tend it.
That Monday, the lilies only made the manor feel emptier. Their sweetness hung in the still air with nowhere to go. Mr. Harwood had been gone for nine days, and the house had not yet learned it. I kept expecting to hear his slippers on the stairs, his dry cough, his voice asking whether the coffee was fresh.
He had been a widower when I first came to work for him, all those years ago. I had walked up the long gravel drive that first morning bracing myself for a wealthy, distant employer, the kind of man who would look through me as if I were part of the furniture, who would leave notes instead of speaking and expect the house to run itself by magic. That is what money usually buys, in my experience. Distance.
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