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Josefina knew the house by its sounds.
The espresso machine at 6:47 AM. Deborah's heels on marble, seven o'clock if there was a meeting, eight-thirty if there wasn't. Marcus letting himself in through, calling out "Deb?" like he still wasn't sure he was allowed even after all those years.
And the piano.
Or, the piano as it used to be.
She remembered a Tuesday last spring. She'd been arranging tulips when she heard it, something bright and playful, Deborah humming along, her voice soft in a way it never was on stage. Josefina had paused, a stem in hand. Through the doorway she could see Deborah at the piano in her light blue cardigan, reading glasses sliding down her nose, fingers dancing like she'd forgotten anyone else existed.
It had been Gershwin, maybe, or Bizet, Josefina had never been good with composers, but she knew joy when she heard it. The melody had filled the house, spilling into every corner, making even the morning light feel warmer.
Marcus had come by that afternoon with contracts from QVC. Some deal that made Deborah smile like a kid who'd just stolen cookies. The piano had been played all week. Her boss played in the mornings before her coffee, in the evenings after wine, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon for no reason at all, when suddenly she found herself with free time. She'd hum while walking through the house, her fingers tapping rhythms against doorframes and countertops.
That was before.
Now Josefina arrived each morning to silence. She watered the plants in the piano room every Monday. The black piano just sat there, board closed, collecting dust that Josefina wiped away with careful hands. Deborah walked past it on her way to the kitchen, eyes straight ahead, like the room didn't exist.
Marcus still came by, of course. Still called out "Deborah?" in that same hopeful tone. They'd disappear into Deborah's office for hours, and Josefina would hear the low murmur of their voices, Marcus's encouraging, Deborah's flat and distant. But when he left, there was no light in his eyes. Just heaviness in his shoulders that Josefina recognized. The weight of watching someone you care about disappear into themselves.
The annual "Jurassic Park" performance by DJ happened on a Saturday. Deborah's daughter sat on the bench and played the theme with theatrical flourish. The only time Josefina heard the piano in months.
The house manager didn't ask why. She'd worked for Deborah Vance long enough. She knew when to speak and when to simply keep the house running. Fresh flowers in every room. Coffee hot. Chaos at bay. Some questions didn't have answers, or the answers were none of her business.
What she didn't expect was that chaos would arrive wearing huge boots and no sense of which water is the best. Acqua Panna, of course.
Ava Daniels is hired on a Tuesday.
Since that day Josefina finds muddy boot prints on the entryway floor. Not Deborah's shoes, which never tracked anything. Not Marcus's loafers. These were treaded, deliberate marks leading towards his office.
"What..." she started, but Deborah was already breezing past with her coffee, waving a hand.
The boot owner emerged with a laptop so covered in stickers and screen so dirty that Josefina had to physically restrain herself from wiping it down. Oversized hoodie. Still wearing those boots. She'll have to make her leave them outside.
"Hey," Ava said, like she was greeting a roommate and not the house manager of a Las Vegas Diva. "Is there, like, matcha? Or can I order some?"
A couple of months later, Ava moved in. Something about Marty being an asshole and writing a new set. She stayed at one of the suites down the hall and the only thing she asked for was toothpaste. Strange girl.
By the end of the first week of Ava living at the mansion, there were three types of matcha in the pantry. The fridge had a shelf Josefina mentally labeled "Ava's chaos." Oat milk in glass bottles. Weird fermented things in jars with handwritten labels. A bag of gummy edibles that Ava didn't even try to hide, just tossed in next to the overpriced yogurt. The girl rearranged furniture without asking, draped blankets over chairs, left notebooks on every flat surface, asked questions about everything.
"Why are there so many salt and pepper shakers?" she asked one morning, hands on her hips in front of Deborah's collection.
"Because Deborah collects them," Josefina said.
"From where?"
"Everywhere."
"Huh," Ava said, like this was the most fascinating thing she'd ever heard. She picked up a set shaped like tiny Elvis figurines, turned them over in her hands, set them down carefully. Then she picked up another. And another. She spent forever examining each one, asking about the stories behind them, which ones were Deborah's favorites, whether she ever actually used them. Also told Josefina the story about the Jean Royère pepper shaker Deborah made her buy, and the older women doesn't comment that those are in the center of the expositor, even if don't appear like it for an untrained eye.
Weeks passed, her staff whispered. Josefina caught fragments in the laundry room, in the kitchen when they thought she wasn't listening.
"...staying in her house..."
"...awfully comfortable for a writer..."
"...have you seen the way she just walks around in her pajamas..."
"...did you see how Deborah looks at her..."
"Enough," Josefina said. Not loud. Firm. The whispering stopped. They knew better than to gossip where she could hear. And they definitely knew better than to gossip about Deborah's personal life, whatever shape it was taking.
But she noticed things. It was her job to notice. To keep it organized.
Deborah's morning coffee happened later now. Nine, sometimes nine-thirty. Her and Ava holed up in the office, laughing at something on a laptop screen, their voices carrying down the hallway in a way that made Josefina smile despite herself.
The fridge suddenly full of takeout leftovers, ice cream and things that required little to no preparation. Because Ava kept saying "we should order sushi" and Deborah, impossibly, agreed. Josefina would find them in the kitchen some evenings, the redhead eating ice cream directly over the sink while Deborah sipped wine and told stories, both of them getting in each other's way and not seeming to mind at all.
And then, Josefina was in the hallway arranging the pictures when she heard it.
The piano.
She stopped. Frame in hand.
But this wasn't what her boss usually played. This was messy. Clumsy. Someone picking out a melody one note at a time, each note uncertain.
"No, like this," Deborah's voice, patient in a way Josefina rarely heard. "See? The chord goes..."
The notes changed. Smoother. More confident.
"Oh shit, okay, I kind of hear it now."
"So eloquent."
"You literally said 'fuck' seventeen times in a row yesterday."
"I can do it, I've earned it."
Laughter. Both of them. Bright and easy and unguarded.
Josefina placed the framed picture in its place and allowed herself a smile. She stood there for a moment, just listening. The piano stumbled through the melody again, Ava's hands following Deborah's guidance, and even the mistakes sounded like joy.
They left for the tour on a Monday night.
The house felt wrong immediately. Josefina went through her routines, watered the plants, wiped down counters, walked the dogs, but there was an absence to everything. She'd gotten used to the sound of voices, the laughter, the music. Now there was only silence again, but different.
The matcha was still in the pantry. She didn't throw it out. The fermented things still in the fridge. Ava's notebooks still scattered around the house, pages marked with notes in the margins, sketches and ideas and half-finished thoughts.
Josefina collected them carefully, stacked them on the desk in the redhead's room. Just in case.
Then Deborah came home.
Alone.
Josefina was pulling the car around when she saw her boss's face through the window and knew immediately something had broken. Deborah looked smaller somehow. Older. The kind of tired that sleep wouldn't fix, that lived in the bones and the heart.
"Welcome home, Deborah," she said, opening the door.
"Thank you, Josefina," Deborah said, and disappeared into the house without another word.
The days that followed were worse than before. Before Ava, there was silence. Now there was grief. A living thing that pressed against the walls, that made the air feel heavy. Deborah didn't go near the piano room. Didn't go near Ava's room either. When Josefina watered the plants on Thursday, she noticed her boss had rearranged the salt and pepper shakers. Organized by size now, all in neat rows. All the joy of their randomness erased, the stories behind them forgotten. The Jean Royère set nowhere in sight.
The matcha sat untouched. The fermented things expired. Eventually, Josefina threw them out, her hands gentle as she cleared the shelf, like she was erasing evidence of something beautiful that had existed and then stopped.
Marcus still came by. Although when he did, he didn't stay long. His meetings with Deborah were brief, tense, the murmur of their voices no longer comfortable but strained. Once, Josefina saw him standing outside Deborah's office, hand raised to knock. He stood there for a long moment, hand suspended in air. Then he lowered it and walked away, shoulders slumped.
Festivities arrived. The house was decorated, Josefina made sure of it, because routines mattered, because life went on even when it felt like it shouldn't. But the garlands, lights and the fake snow felt like set dressing. Beautiful and empty. Deborah went through the motions, attended events, hosted the biggest Christmas party and disappeared into her room.
The notebooks still sat on the desk in the suite. Josefina dusted their surfaces.
On a Friday morning, Josefina let herself in through the side entrance at 5:45 AM, exactly as she had for years.
And she heard it.
The piano.
Not the halting, clumsy notes of someone learning. Not the bright, solitary melody of Deborah playing alone.
Two people. Four hands. The melody weaving together, stumbling, laughing, trying again.
Josefina set down her bag carefully. Her heart doing something complicated in her chest, a flutter that felt like hope and relief and something softer she couldn't quite name.
She followed the sound down the hallway, her footsteps quiet on the marble. The house felt different already. Lighter. Like something that had been holding its breath was finally exhaling.
The door to the piano room was open. Morning light shyly streamed through the windows, that golden quality of early sun that made everything look softer, warmer, more forgiving. At the Steinway, squeezed together on the narrow bench: Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels.
Deborah in her silk pajamas, the yellow ones, reading glasses perched on her nose. Ava wearing Deborah's pajamas, the expensive Zebra set Josefina knew for a fact Deborah had ordered from some boutique in New York and never let anyone else touch. Ava's hair down, messy around her shoulders, still damp like she'd just showered. She was leaning into Deborah's space like there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be, like the months apart had never happened, or had happened and made this moment more precious.
Their hands moved across the keys. Ava's following Deborah's lead, stumbling over a chord.
"Wait, wait, I almost had it..."
"You're overthinking. Just feel it."
"That's rich coming from you, Ms. I-Have-Seventeen-Backup-Plans."
"Twenty, actually. And don't think I didn't notice you dodging my question about that gig."
"I'm not dodging, I'm processing."
"You're stalling."
"I'm processing my stalling, okay?"
Ava laughed, bright and unrestrained, and Deborah's face did something Josefina hadn't seen in months. Softened. Opened. Became young. The lines around her eyes crinkled in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with joy.
They tried the song again. This time it worked, the notes flowing together seamlessly. The girl let out a little whoop of victory that made Deborah laugh, really laugh, her shoulders shaking, her head tilted back.
The woman didn't mean to make a sound, but something shifted. A floorboard creaked beneath her weight. Her breathing, too loud in the quiet morning. Ava looked up, and her whole face lit up when she saw Josefina standing there.
"Oh! Hey, Josefina." Her face flushed. Happy. Caught. Like a kid who'd snuck downstairs on Christmas morning.
Deborah turned more slowly. For a second there was something wary in her expression. Defensive, maybe. Afraid of judgment, of questions, of the outside world intruding on this fragile, perfect thing. But then she saw Josefina's face, whatever her face was doing, and the wariness melted into something that looked like relief.
There was, Josefina noted with the careful observation of someone who'd spent years noticing everything, a small purple mark on Deborah's neck. Just above the collar of her pajamas. Definitely not there yesterday afternoon when she had left for the day.
"Welcome back home, Ava," Josefina said, and meant it with every fiber of her being.
Ava's smile could power the whole Vegas strip. "Thanks. It's really good to be back."
Deborah's hand, Josefina noticed, had found Ava's on the piano bench. Their fingers laced together, casual and comfortable and sure.
"I'll start breakfast," The house manager said, and left them there. Together. In the morning light. The piano singing again.
In the kitchen, she started the espresso machine, the familiar hum a comfort. She opened the fridge to get the milk and stopped. There, on what used to be Ava's shelf, freshly stocked: three types of matcha. The glass bottles of oat milk that definitely hadn't been there yesterday. Her boss must have been grocery shopping.
Josefina smiled and got to work.
She hummed while she worked, the same melody she'd heard from the piano room. She didn't recognize it, but that was all right. She didn't need to. What mattered was that it existed again, that the house was full of sound and life and the particular kind of chaos that came from two people who'd found their way back to each other.
The house, finally, sounded like home.