“I pay you more than any other nanny in this city,” he said without a greeting, without asking if she was alright, “and yet you say you’re leaving too.”
“I’m not leaving because of the salary, Señor Marcos,” she replied. “I’m leaving because your children cry as if they know something the adults don’t want to accept yet.”
A sharp silence filled the vestibule, broken only by the distant echo of two piercing screams rising from the nursery like knives piercing through marble.
Marcos stepped closer, and Carmen, standing in the dining room doorway, felt an absurd urge to intervene because she recognized that dangerous look of wounded pride in her master’s eyes.
“They are infants,” Marcos snapped. “Infants cry, and that is why trained people are hired—not to listen to cheap, superstitious speeches.”
Fernanda looked at him with such pure pity that, for the first time in years, Marcos felt someone see right through him, and he didn’t like it at all.
“They don’t need another professional,” she whispered. “They need a father who will walk into that room without thinking about meetings, contracts, image, or inheritance.”
Those words fell like a glass of ice water on hidden coals, and Marcos’s jaw tightened so hard his teeth audibly ground together.
“You have no right to judge me,” he said, raising his voice. “You know nothing of my life, nor what I do to maintain this house, this family, and everything else.”
“That is the horror, Señor Marcos,” she replied. “You think maintaining everything is the same as being present, and your children seem to be paying the price for that difference.”
Then she headed for the front door without looking back, just as the twins erupted into such a furious cry that several paintings in the hallway trembled slightly on their hooks.
Carmen silently crossed herself—an old gesture she always hid when Marcos was around, because in this house, faith was tolerated only if it didn’t disrupt the aesthetics.
The door closed, and the crash seemed to merge with the cries of Pedro and Paulo, who for eight months had been crying not like babies, but like warnings.
Marcos ran up the stairs, skipping two steps at a time, his heart hammering against his ribs, more irritated with himself for feeling fear than for the scene he had just endured below.
He threw open the nursery door and saw the two cribs, shaking slightly, as if the air were too heavy and even the wood wanted to pull away.
Pedro’s tiny fists were clenched, his lips blue, and on his face was a desperate rage that resembled nothing Marcos had read in parenting books.
There was no fever, no signs of choking, no bruises, no medical reason, and yet the horror of the scene made any elegant explanation useless.
“Carmen!” Marcos barked. “Call all the agencies again, anyone you want, and tell them I’ll double any amount.”
Carmen appeared in the doorway with a crumpled apron, nervously wringing her hands, with the ancient exhaustion in her eyes of someone who had seen too much in silence.
“I’ve already called, Señor,” she said. “No one wants to come. The agencies say the girls return in tears, with panic attacks, and some don’t even finish their first shift.”
Marcos gave a bitter, short, hollow laugh—the kind of laugh that comes when a man begins to suspect that money has stopped obeying him.
“Then find someone outside the agencies,” he ordered. “It doesn’t matter where from. Let them come, let them try, let them do anything. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Carmen hesitated for a few seconds, and that small delay caught Marcos’s attention more than any immediate answer, because in her world, every silence meant something.
“There is a young girl at the service entrance,” she finally said. “She came for a cleaning position, but hearing the children, she asked if they needed a nanny.”
Marcos closed his eyes for a moment, like a man humiliated by fate, yet forced to accept the irony to keep breathing.
“Fine,” he said. “After twelve defeated nannies, perhaps a cleaning girl will perform the miracle the specialists couldn’t.”
Carmen went downstairs without answering, while the twins continued to scream with such broken fury that the sound seemed to come from the whole house, not just the nursery.
Two minutes later, a girl entered the vestibule with such a misplaced serenity that the tension in the air seemed to shift just to observe her.
Her name was Elena Silva; she was twenty-eight years old, with a simple hairstyle, modest clothes, the thin hands of a worker, and a calm expression that didn’t seem like naivety.
The mansion didn’t impress her, the marble didn’t distract her, the chandeliers didn’t make her shrink, and she didn’t even flinch when the twins wailed again.
On the contrary, she lifted her face with a strange attentiveness, as if the sound didn’t frighten her but allowed her to recognize a terrible message within it.
“Good evening, Señor Marcos,” she said. “I am Elena. Carmen explained the basics to me, though honestly, I don’t think ‘the basics’ can describe what is happening inside here.”
Marcos was too exhausted to pretend to be polite, so he dryly pointed toward the stairs, his pride turned to rags.
“I don’t need manners or theories,” he said. “I need these children to stop crying for at least ten minutes so I can think like a normal person.”
Elena met his gaze without lowering her eyes, and that alone was enough to unsettle him, because almost no one in his house had done that for a long time.
“I heard them from the street,” she replied. “They aren’t crying just from hunger, sleep, or physical pain. They are crying as if they want to be found before it’s too late.”
Carmen swallowed; Marcos frowned; and for a second, the echo of that phrase seemed to strike even the mirrors in the main corridor.
Continue reading…
