The kitchen was large and institutional in the way that wealthy people’s kitchens are when they’re built for staff rather than for the family.
All stainless steel and overhead fluorescent work lights, nothing decorative. Four other staff members were already there.
Phyllis, the house manager, 60s, with the posture of someone who’d spent decades being watched and had made her peace with it.
Two household staff, Deja and Tamara, who moved around each other with the wordless ease of people who’d stopped needing to communicate out loud.
And a groundskeeper named Arthur, who sat apart from the others eating a breakfast sandwich with concentrated focus and no apparent interest in anything else.
Calloway appeared at 7:04, white dress shirt, sleeves already rolled. He’d been working before any of them arrived.
He poured coffee without looking at faces, the way people do when they’ve learned to manage the small awkwardness of shared space through deliberate inattention, and ran through the week’s schedule in efficient shorthand.
“Loop office Tuesday and Thursday. Evanston site visit Wednesday. Formal dinner Friday. Dining room to be prepared.”
He didn’t look at Imani once during the meeting. She understood the logic and didn’t take it personally.
What she did take note of, filed and held, was the way Phyllis looked at her when Calloway left the kitchen.
Not hostile. Something more careful than that. The look of someone assembling a picture from partial information, trying to understand what piece they were missing.
Why is she here? What did she do to get here? The first 3 days were surface work.
Imani cleaned. She learned the layout methodically, one section per day, building the map from the outside in.
Main floor, west wing, formal rooms, piano room, the bar that was never used. Second floor, Calloway’s private study, a guest suite, two storage rooms, the gym facing north, the media room, the six-car garage whose layout she memorized through windows.
The east wing was accessed through a key card door at the end of the second floor hallway.
Her card didn’t open it. She tested it once on her second day, walking past it a pace that wouldn’t read as deliberate, and the panel gave one short red blink.
She didn’t try again. She noted [clears throat] the gap and kept moving. What she did instead was watch.
Phyllis was the organizing intelligence of the household. Everything flowed through her. She didn’t gossip.
She didn’t offer opinions about the family. But by Wednesday, she knocked on the guest suite doorframe where Imani was working and said without preface, “How did you get this job?”
Imani kept smoothing the fitted sheet. “Mr. Briggs offered it.” “After the party?” “Yes.” Phyllis moved into the room and straightened a pillow that didn’t need straightening.
“She’s going to notice you,” she said. Not a warning. A fact being presented to someone who might not have weighed it fully.
“I know.” “She notices everything that changes. I’ve been in this house 6 years. She’s been here 8 months and somehow knows more about its operations than I do.”
Phyllis set the pillow down and looked at the window. “She asked me once, casually, like it was nothing, about the renewal schedule for the estate’s maintenance vendors.
Who we used, how long the contracts ran, whether Mr. Briggs reviewed them personally.” “What did you tell her?”
