Chapter 2 - The Sound of the Bucket
By the end of the second week, I expected Emma to be gone.
I had made a point of making her job an unbearable nightmare. I left my study doors open while I roared at underbosses over encrypted satellite lines, letting the bloodiest details of our operations echo down the hall while she mopped. I deliberately dropped heavy glass ash trays onto the hardwood to see if she would jump. I complained to Mrs. Gable that the polish she used on the mahogany banisters smelled like cheap chemical poison.
Nothing worked.
Emma arrived every night at precisely 11:58 PM. She carried her yellow plastic caddy with her cleaning solutions, her bucket, and a worn-out blue canvas backpack that looked as if it had been dragged through every alley in Cook County. She didn't wear headphones. She didn't sing. She worked with a silent, terrifying efficiency that bordered on robotic.
From my desk in the study, I began to learn the rhythm of her shift.
12:00 AM to 1:15 AM: The long gallery corridor. The sound of her sponge—slosh, wring, wipe, repeat.
1:15 AM to 2:30 AM: The library and private lounge. The soft thud of heavy leather books being lifted, dusted beneath, and replaced with mathematical precision.
2:30 AM to 3:00 AM: Her break. She didn't go to the staff kitchen in the basement. She sat on the cold marble floor in the alcove near the service elevator, her back pressed against the wall, eating a peanut butter sandwich out of a plastic sandwich bag.
I knew this because I watched her through the security feeds on my desktop monitor.
"She’s quiet," Luke remarked one afternoon as he dropped a stack of legal documents on my desk. "Mrs. Gable says she’s the best cleaner we’ve had in five years. Doesn't steal, doesn't poke around, doesn't talk to the security guards."
"She’s an eyesore," I grumbled, scanning the signatures on a land transfer agreement. "Look at her. She looks like a breeze could blow her off the balcony."
"She works nine hours a day at a greasy spoon diner on 26th Street before she comes here," Luke said offhandedly, reaching into his pocket for a cigar. "I had Security run her background check, just in case. Her name is Emma Vance—no relation to you, obviously. Her father died six years ago, leaving three hundred grand in medical debt. Her mother has early-onset Alzheimer's and lives in a private care unit in Oak Park."
I paused, my pen hovering over the paper. "Oak Park isn't cheap."
"It's four grand a month," Luke said, clipping the end of his cigar. "Emma’s two months behind on payments. The facility sent a collections warning last week. That’s why she took the night shift here. Thirty an hour extra for night hazardous duty in the 'monster wing.'"
I felt a strange, unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach. "I don't offer hazardous duty pay."
"Mrs. Gable added it out of her own discretionary budget because nobody else would take the wing," Luke replied with a dry smirk. "So don't fire her, Victor. You're funding a nursing home."
"I don't care about her mother," I said coldly, slamming the folder shut. "I care about my privacy."
That night, at 2:15 AM, I deliberately rolled my chair into the library while she was dusting the top shelves of the historical archives. She was standing on a three-step aluminum ladder, her thin arms stretched high above her head, wiping down the leather spines of a first-edition set of encyclopedia volumes.
I stopped the chair near the fireplace, watching her. Her polo shirt had pulled up slightly, revealing a strip of pale skin over her ribs. Her spine was visible—every vertebra stacked like small white stones beneath thin skin.
"You missed a spot on the second shelf," I lied.
Emma didn't drop her arm. She paused, turned her head slightly, and looked down at me from the ladder. Her eyes were dull, rimmed with red veins from lack of sleep.
"I haven't reached the second shelf yet, Mr. Vance," she said softly.
"I'm telling you there's dust on it."
She let out a breath—a tiny, invisible puff of air—and stepped down the ladder. She stood three feet from my chair, holding her microfiber cloth.
"If I re-wipe the second shelf now, it’ll take three minutes," she said, her voice steady. "Which means I won't have time to polish the brass fire irons before three. Do you want the shelf redone, or do you want the fire irons polished?"
I stared at her, my hands tightening on the armrests. "Are you bargaining with me?"
"I'm managing my time," she replied. "You pay me for eight hours. I give you eight hours of work. If you want me to do things twice, I need more hours, or you need lower standards."
A sudden, sharp laugh ripped out of my throat before I could stop it. It was a harsh, rusty sound—a sound that hadn't echoed in this house since the night the bullet hit my back.
Emma blinked, her expression shifting just a fraction—a microscopic flicker of surprise in her tired green eyes.
"What?" I growled, instantly suppressing the laugh, my face hardening back into its accustomed mask.
"Nothing," she said, turning back to the ladder. "It’s just the first time I’ve heard you sound like a person instead of a foghorn."
"Get out," I growled.
"I have twenty minutes left in the library," she said smoothly, climbing back up the first rung. "I’ll leave at 2:30."
I sat there in the dim firelight, watching her clean. I wanted to order my security guards to drag her out by her arms. I wanted to write her a severance check and tell her to go starve in the Chicago winter.
But as I sat there, listening to the soft swish of her cloth against the old leather, the suffocating, heavy silence of the house felt just a little bit lighter.
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She didn't care that I controlled the docks. She didn't care that I had killed men with my own hands before my legs went dark. To her, I was just an obstacle on an aluminum ladder—a stubborn, loud man who was slowing down her shift.
And for reasons I couldn't begin to explain to myself, that was the first real thing I had felt in two long years.
