Chapter 4 - The Sealed Sanctuary
By midnight, the ground floor was as clean as it was going to get without a professional restoration crew. The boys were sound asleep in their grand, overly large bedrooms—rooms that looked more like sterile hotel suites than places where children slept. I had dragged three spare mattresses into Tommy's room, refusing to let them sleep isolated in separate wings of the house. They had drifted off piled together like a litter of puppies under a heavy weighted blanket.
I walked quietly down the dimly lit hallway of the West Wing. The mansion was suffocatingly quiet at night, the silence heavy with the weight of missing memories.
At the very end of the corridor stood a double oak door. Unlike the rest of the polished wood in the house, these doors were secured with a modern, digital keypad lock, glowing with a soft, ominous blue light.
"It's private property, Nanny Maya."
I jumped, spinning around. Julian was standing in the shadows near a floor-to-ceiling window, holding a glass of dark scotch. He had stripped off his suit jacket, his crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, making him look surprisingly human—and terribly exhausted.
"I was just securing the perimeter," I lied smoothly, leaning back against the wall. "The boys mentioned this wing."
"The boys need to keep their mouths shut," Julian snapped softly, taking a long sip of his drink. He walked toward the locked door, staring at the digital keypad as if it were a physical wound. "That was my wife’s studio. Eleanor."
"The one who left," I said quietly.
Julian let out a harsh, bitter laugh. "Left? Is that what the media calls it? Is that what seventeen nannies reported back to their agencies?"
He turned his head to look at me, his blue eyes bloodshot, glittering with a profound, terrifying grief. "Eleanor didn't leave us, Maya. She died. Two years ago. In a car crash three miles from this driveway."
The air left my lungs in a cold rush. "They think she abandoned them," I whispered, remembering Bobby’s words—Daddy said we broke Mommy and made her leave.
"It was easier to let them think she walked away than to explain that she was burned to ash in a metal frame!" Julian’s voice cracked, his control snapping like a dry twig. "They look just like her! Every time Tommy glaring at me, every time Danny smiles, every time Bobby cries—it’s her! I can’t... I couldn't look at them without feeling like I was suffocating!"
"So you locked yourself away in your work," I said, step by step piecing together the horror story of this family. "You let them believe they were so terrible, so unlovable, that their own mother threw them away. And then you wondered why they acted like animals."
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Julian flinched as if I had slapped him. "I provided for them! They have everything!"
"They don't have a father!" I shouted, dropping my voice to a sharp whisper as I remembered the sleeping boys down the hall. "They have a landlord! You built a prison of money and left three six-year-olds to rot in it with their own guilt!"
