He genuinely could not understand why she would leave a beautiful apartment.

That was the whole of his blindness in a single misunderstanding: he saw people as furniture, as amenities, as assets attached to positions, and so he could not conceive of a loyalty that attached to a person instead of a place.

Teresa could.

Teresa always had.

She folded her apron on that bare counter and walked out of the life he thought he had kept, because her loyalty had never for one day belonged to him, and he had been too busy admiring his own reflection to notice.

I hired no one to replace her.