Lucía carried boxes until her wrists ached.
When they finally stepped back onto the street, the sky above Paris had turned pearl gray, and the city smelled faintly of rain and traffic.
Héctor stopped outside the boutique.
People flowed around them in neat coats and quick steps, but he stood completely still, staring at her as if trying to reconcile two impossible versions.
“The maid who organizes my library,” he said at last, “speaks better French than the consultants I’m meeting tomorrow.”
Lucía tightened her grip on the boxes.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
His brows drew together.
“That wasn’t an accusation.”
It was the first unexpected thing he had said to her.
She did not know what to do with it.
They walked in silence toward the car.
At the hotel entrance, a doorman rushed to help with the packages, but Héctor waved him off and turned to Lucía again.
“Who taught you?”
“My mother was a teacher,” she said, surprising herself by answering fully. “Before she got sick. She taught literature at a public school.”
“And your father?”
Lucía hesitated.
“I never knew him.”
The doorman stood waiting.
Traffic hummed behind them.
Héctor glanced at the worn cloth bag still pressed against her side.
“And what else,” he asked quietly, “have you been doing in my house besides dusting shelves?”
Lucía should have lied.
The old instinct begged her to shrink, to become harmless again.
But something in Paris, perhaps the distance, perhaps the exhaustion, loosened the knot in her throat.
“I read the books no one opens,” she said.
He stared at her for a long second.
Then he turned and walked inside.
That evening, rain tapped softly against the small window of Lucía’s room while she sat on the narrow bed with The Little Prince open in her lap.
But she was not reading.
Her hands would not stop trembling.
Across the corridor and three floors above, Héctor was probably dressing for dinner, adjusting cuffs, approving numbers, continuing the life that had nothing to do with hers.
Yet something had shifted.
Not in the world.
In the way he had looked at her.
As if invisibility, once broken, could never be fully restored.
At seven-thirty, a knock came at her door.
It was not housekeeping.
It was Héctor.
He stood there in the new midnight jacket, severe and immaculate, one hand in his pocket, expression unreadable.
“I need you downstairs,” he said.
Lucía rose too quickly.
“Now, sir?”
“Yes. One of my interpreters had an emergency. The investors changed the dinner from Spanish to French. You will sit in and translate when necessary.”
