The meeting with the Hitlers came and went the following afternoon, and in the end, it told Damien remarkably little of any real substance. Mathews deflected every single genuine question with vague, clearly rehearsed answers, his eyes never quite meeting Damien's directly for more than a second or two at a time. Kassandra barely spoke at all throughout the entire uncomfortable meeting, her gaze darting repeatedly toward the door, like she was silently counting down the minutes until she could properly leave the room and this entire uncomfortable line of questioning behind her. Whatever the two of them were genuinely hiding, they clearly weren't ready to hand it over willingly, not without considerably more pressure than Damien had chosen to apply during this particular first attempt.
He left the meeting more frustrated than he'd arrived, the thin folder of records feeling suddenly heavier in his briefcase than its actual weight would properly suggest. Felix had watched the entire exchange from a chair near the window, saying little, though his expression afterward had matched Damien's own simmering frustration precisely.
"They're hiding something," Felix said as they walked back out to the car. "I'd stake my own reputation on it."
"I know," Damien said grimly. "I simply don't yet know what."
The days settled slowly into a strange, uneasy rhythm after that disappointing meeting. Silveria learned the particular shape of her new life gradually, piece by careful piece. Breakfast alone most mornings, since Damien often left the house before she had even properly woken up. Long, quiet afternoons spent wandering through the enormous gardens or curled comfortably into a corner of the library with a book she rarely actually managed to finish reading properly, her mind too often wandering elsewhere.
It was during one of these long, empty afternoons that she found herself back in the kitchen again, this time helping Rosa carefully fold an enormous pile of fresh linens, simply grateful, if she was being honest with herself, for something practical to occupy her increasingly restless hands.
"Can I ask you something, Rosa?" Silveria said carefully, watching the older woman work with practiced, wonderfully efficient movements, folding each sheet into a perfect, crisp square without seeming to even properly think about the motion.
"Of course, dear. Ask whatever you'd like."
"How long exactly have you worked for this particular family?"
Rosa smiled at that, something fond and a little sad crossing over her weathered, kind face. "Nearly twenty years now, if you can believe it. I started when Damien's mother was still alive, actually. I was quite young back then myself, barely older than you currently are, if I'm remembering correctly."
"What was she like? His mother, I mean," Silveria asked, setting down the sheet she'd been folding to give the conversation her full attention.
Rosa's careful hands paused briefly over the linens spread across the table between them. "Warm," she said finally, after a moment's genuine consideration. "Warmer than this entire house has properly felt in a very long time now, if I'm being completely honest with you about it. She used to fill every single room she entered with music, with actual laughter that you could hear echoing clear down the hallway. This whole house used to feel genuinely alive back in those days, in a way it simply doesn't any longer."
"What happened to change all of that?" Silveria asked gently, though some part of her already suspected the answer.
"The accident happened," Rosa said quietly, her voice dropping considerably. "Damien was only ten years old at the time, still such a young boy. His parents died instantly in the crash, from what I've always understood. His little sister, Amara, she didn't manage to survive the hospital that same terrible night either, despite everyone's very best efforts to save her. Damien himself walked away from the whole crash with barely a scratch on him, physically speaking, at least. But something inside him broke apart that particular night too, just as completely and irrevocably as anything else that family properly lost."
Silveria's chest tightened painfully at hearing that. "He was only a child himself, though. Barely more than a little boy."
"He was," Rosa agreed softly, nodding slowly. "But children so often blame themselves for things far beyond their own proper control, more often than most adults would ever fully realize or understand. Damien was apparently supposed to be watching his little sister carefully in the back seat that particular day. That's what I've always heard, anyway, though he's genuinely never once spoken about any of the actual details directly to me, not in all these years I've worked here in this house."
"He talks about it like it happened to someone else entirely," Silveria said slowly, thinking back carefully to the careful, distant way he had briefly discussed his parents' deaths with her in the library just days earlier. "Like he's simply reciting cold facts rather than actually, properly remembering them himself. It's strange, listening to someone describe their own tragedy that way, like they're reading it off a page belonging to a stranger."
"That's very likely the only way he's ever managed to find to properly survive carrying something that heavy for so many years running," Rosa said wisely, her voice gentle. "Grief that enormous, when you're still that young when it happens to you, you either learn somehow to lock it carefully away somewhere very deep inside yourself where it can't properly reach you, or it eventually swallows you whole entirely, and there's simply nothing left of the person you might have otherwise become."
Silveria thought carefully about that observation for a long while after their quiet conversation had properly ended, turning the entire piece of information over slowly and deliberately in her mind, the way she so often turned over an unfinished sketch when something about its composition wasn't quite sitting right yet. The cold, carefully guarded businessman she had somehow married just days earlier was slowly beginning to make a great deal more genuine sense to her now, piece by careful piece, like a puzzle finally starting to properly come together.
"Does he ever let anyone in, do you think?" she asked quietly, resuming her folding. "Past all those careful walls he's built up around himself?"
Rosa considered the question seriously for a long moment before finally answering. "Not that I've personally witnessed, dear, not in all these years," she admitted honestly. "Not in twenty years spent watching him slowly grow from a grieving, frightened little boy into the careful, guarded man he's become today."
"Why are you telling me all of this?" Silveria asked, genuinely curious now. "You barely know me. I only arrived here a few short weeks ago."
Rosa met her eyes steadily across the table, something knowing and quietly certain in her own gentle expression. "Because I think you might actually turn out to be different," she said simply. "I've watched a great many people pass through the doors of this particular house over the years I've worked here, dear. Business partners, distant relations, the occasional guest at some function or another. None of them, not a single one, have ever managed to make him pause mid-sentence quite the way you already seem to, and you've barely been here any time at all."
"I don't know if that's entirely true," Silveria said, though something warm had settled quietly in her chest at the observation regardless.
"I've worked in this house a very long time," Rosa said, folding the final sheet with practiced precision. "I notice things other people tend to miss entirely. Trust an old woman's careful instincts on this particular matter, if nothing else. I've seen enough marriages arranged for business over the years, dear, real and pretend both, to know the difference when it's starting to form right in front of me."
"Is that what's happening here? Something starting to form?"
Rosa only smiled at that, gathering the folded linens into a neat stack without offering a proper answer, and Silveria decided, watching her, that some questions simply weren't meant to be answered quite so directly, not yet.
They finished the remaining linens together in comfortable, companionable silence after that, Silveria's mind turning steadily over everything she'd just learned, piecing together a portrait of her strange, careful husband that felt considerably more complete now than it had that very morning, even if enormous pieces of the full picture still remained frustratingly, entirely missing.
Later that same evening, unable to properly settle her restless thoughts, Silveria found herself wandering back down toward the kitchen for a second time, though considerably earlier than her midnight excursion of a few nights before. Rosa was still there, preparing something for the following day's breakfast, humming quietly to herself as she worked.
"You're back," Rosa said, not looking up from the dough she was carefully kneading.
"I couldn't stop thinking about everything you told me," Silveria admitted, settling onto one of the stools near the counter. "About Amara. About the accident."
"I hoped it might help you understand him a little better," Rosa said. "Not excuse him, exactly. He can be difficult, and I won't pretend otherwise. But understanding tends to make difficult things easier to bear, in my experience."
"Do you think he'll ever properly talk about her? Amara, I mean. To anyone?"
Rosa considered the question carefully, her hands still working the dough with practiced rhythm. "I think," she said slowly, "that grief like his needs somewhere safe to finally land before it can be properly spoken aloud. He's never had that safe place, not since it happened. Whether he finds one now, that's entirely up to him, and perhaps up to whoever he eventually decides to trust with it."
"That's a lot of pressure to put on one person," Silveria said quietly, thinking of herself despite trying not to.
"I'm not putting pressure on anyone, dear," Rosa said, glancing up finally with a knowing look. "I'm simply telling you what I've observed after twenty years in this house. Take from it whatever you'd like."
Silveria sat with that for a while, watching Rosa work, the quiet warmth of the kitchen settling comfortably around her. There was something almost meditative about watching someone perform a task they'd clearly done thousands of times before, hands moving with the easy confidence of long practice.
"Can I ask you something else?" Silveria said finally.
"Of course."
"Do you think I'm foolish for wanting to understand him properly? Given everything. The contract, the rules, all of it?"
Rosa set down the dough and properly looked at her then, something gentle in her weathered expression. "I think," she said carefully, "that wanting to understand another person is rarely foolish, dear, whatever the circumstances surrounding it happen to be. It's what you choose to do with that understanding afterward that matters considerably more."
"And what should I do with it?"
"That," Rosa said, returning to her work with a small, knowing smile, "is something only you can properly decide for yourself, in your own time."
Silveria left the kitchen a while later, Rosa's words following her back up the quiet staircase toward her own room. She thought about Damien somewhere in his separate wing of the house, likely still awake, likely still working, carrying seventeen years of grief he'd never once properly set down in front of another living soul. She thought about the careful promise they'd made each other at breakfast, the one about not falling in love, and wondered, for the first time since arriving in this strange, enormous house, whether that particular promise had ever really stood much of a chance at all.