Chapter 4 - The Kitchen Table
By 3:00 a.m., the Alvarez mansion was no longer a fortress.
It was just a very large, very cold house in the middle of Tennessee woods.
Joseph didn't go back to his office. He didn't check the eleven monitors. He walked straight through the double doors of the kitchen, past the gleaming commercial range, past the stainless-steel prep tables where Hilda’s carrot shavings still lay scattered on the linoleum like orange pine needles.
Hilda was sitting at the small wooden table in the corner—the one the staff used for their quick coffee breaks before the sun came up.
She had a cup of black coffee between her knuckles. She didn't look up when he pulled out the second chair and sat down across from her.
“Is she home?” Hilda asked.
“Calvin’s dropping her off,” Joseph said. He reached across the table, picked up the white ceramic mug Hilda had left untouched, and turned it in his fingers. “How long?”
“Since the summer,” Hilda said quietly. “After the heat wave killed the garden. Martha didn't have nothing left. And I saw the girls. I saw how they were looking when they woke up from their naps—skinny as fence rails, chewing on their own knuckles because the food I was sending up was all fancy-schmancy health-food garbage that didn't stick to their ribs.”
“You could have told me.”
“And what would you have done, Joseph? Called a dietician? Sent another report to the board?” She looked at him then, her old eyes wet with a sudden, fierce anger. “You don't listen to words anymore. You only listen to numbers and glass breaking. Well, you broke the glass tonight. Are you going to fire me?”
Joseph set the mug down.
The ceramic made no sound against the wood.
“No,” he said.
Hilda frowned. “No?”
“You’re going to stay,” Joseph said, leaning forward until the fluorescent light caught the silver in his beard and the faded compass tattoo near his temple. “And starting tomorrow morning, you’re going to rewrite every menu in this house.”
“What kind of menu?”
“Real food,” Joseph said. “Biscuits. Gravy. Country ham. Real butter. Eggs from the farm down the road, not the organic distributor in Atlanta.”
Hilda’s mouth twitched—just a fraction of an inch—before she caught herself and clamped her lips back into a straight line. “That’ll cost less than the salmon.”
“I don't care about the cost,” Joseph said. “I care about the inventory.”
He stood up, his joints popping in the quiet kitchen, and walked toward the back stairs that led up to the nursery.
The house was quiet.
No ringing in his left ear. No phantom hum behind his temples. Just the steady, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the lower hall and the sound of his own boots on the wide oak steps.
When he pushed open the nursery door, the room smelled of old wool and lavender.
Rosalyn was back in her bed, her small face buried deep in the pillow, her breathing deep and even. Camille was curled beside her, one hand still clutching the grey-eared rabbit.
Joseph walked over to the window.
The iron bars were still there—thick, black, cold to the touch.
He reached out, his fingers wrapping around the rusted metal where Martha had reached through forty minutes ago. The frost was thick on the outside, sparkling under the moon like diamond dust.
He didn't unlock them. He didn't call a crew to take them down.
Not yet.
A fortress wasn't torn down in a night. But as Joseph looked out through the bars toward the dark cedar line where the woods began, he knew one thing for certain.
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The locks were no longer keeping the world out.
They were just keeping him honest.
