The night before, his fiancée had leaned across the table, lowered her voice, and whispered something that had stuck in his mind.
“You trust that maid too much,” Patricia had said softly. “She’s stealing from you. And worse… she’s manipulating your daughters.” That phrase haunted him all night.
Not because he immediately believed it.
Because a part of him feared it was true.
For years, Emiliano Duarte had trusted the young woman who cleaned his house and looked after his daughters when he was away. Rosa had always been quiet, careful, respectful. The kind of person most wealthy families never saw. She moved through the house like a shadow, never seeking attention, never meddling where she didn’t belong.
But Patricia had started making small comments.
At first, they seemed harmless.
Then they began to accumulate. “I realized one of my bracelets wasn’t where I’d left it.”
