“The moment Mr.

Gabriel is out of the room.

She has a different voice for the staff — you would not recognize it.” She hesitated, in the way of a person deciding whether to say the worst part.

“Yesterday she made Luis kneel and scrub a footprint off the entry tile.

He is sixty-one years old.

And the footprint was hers — I watched her make it, deliberately, and then call him over.”

I knew Luis.

He had worked in that house since Gabriel was a boy; he had, in fact, taught Gabriel to ride a bicycle in the back drive the summer after his father died, running alongside him with one hand on the seat.

The image of him on his knees before this glittering young woman, scrubbing at a mark she had planted for the pleasure of watching him scrub it, did something to me that all her aimed compliments had only hinted at.

This was who she was in the unwatched hours.