They had forty minutes before the household staff changed shifts without announcing the learning, cataloguing the information in the part of Amara's mind she kept separate from everything else.
Which staff member arrived at what hour? Who overlapped with whom? Which corridors carried sound and which ones absorbed it? Where the walls were thin.
She knew, specifically, that Kalian had someone in the house.
She did not know who. She had her suspicions about the new housekeeper, who had arrived six weeks ago with impeccable references that Amara had checked and found almost too impeccable, the kind of references that had been constructed rather than accumulated.
But suspicion was not certainty, and certainty was not something she could afford to waste on the wrong person.
So she assumed all of it.
