The next morning, the penthouse greeted Isabela with the same cold gleam, its polished surfaces reflecting back her nerves. Mrs. Petrov met her at the door, an expression set in stone.
"Your role," she said briskly, "includes more than wardrobe. Meals, exercise, scheduling appointments. You have a staff apartment on the lower floor, should you choose to stay. But your main duty is this." She stopped in front of two towering mahogany doors.
"Mr. Lawson's wardrobe," she said, unlocking them with a deliberate click. "He is not to be disturbed."
The doors swung wide.
Isabela stepped into a room the size of a small apartment. At first glance it should have been a luxury dream closet. But instead it was chaos. Suits sagged on hangers, ties hung loose and crumpled, shirts piled carelessly, their whites turned dull. It wasn't a wardrobe. It was a graveyard of fabric.
Her chest tightened. This wasn't about clothes. This was about neglect. About grief. She moved slowly, as though stepping into a man's private wounds.
She began with a rack of jackets, her hands methodical, her eyes taking in size, brand, and condition. When her fingers slid into the pocket of a tweed blazer, she touched something small and hard.
She pulled it out.
A silver-plated whistle on a worn leather cord.
Her breath caught. It was simple, almost childish, yet it carried the weight of loss. A father's gift, perhaps. Something meant for laughter, for safety. She closed her hand around it, the cool metal pressing into her palm, and in that instant she knew this was not just a job anymore.
A shadow moved across the doorway.
Ethan.
He leaned against the frame, arms folded, eyes locked on the whistle in her hand. His expression was unreadable, but his silence was heavy. A question. A warning.
Isabela didn't look away.
For the first time, she felt the shift. She wasn't just rearranging a closet. She was walking into a man's grief, one garment, one secret at a time.
Ethan didn't move until the sound of her footsteps faded down the hall. Only then did he step inside the closet, his eyes falling to the spot where she had stood. The whistle still gleamed in his memory, swinging from her fingers like a truth he couldn't escape.
He hadn't touched it in months. Couldn't. Every time he thought about it, the pain clawed at his chest like broken glass. And yet, in her hand, it hadn't seemed like just a relic of his failures. Somehow, she had held it with a kind of reverence, as if it still mattered. As if he still mattered.
For a moment, Ethan's jaw tightened, torn between anger at her intrusion and an ache he didn't want to name. No one had dared to touch that part of his life. Not his staff. Not even him. But she had. And instead of recoiling, she had stood there, steady, with a quiet strength that unsettled him.
He let out a long, uneven breath. He told himself it was just the shock of being caught off guard, nothing more. Still, as he turned back toward his office, he couldn't shake the thought: maybe this woman wasn't just here to organize his closet. Maybe, against his will, she had already begun to open the locked doors he had sworn never to touch again.