The room is dark, shadows falling like dust where bodies have long since ceased to stir. From a window in the corner, moonlight drapes over a small table and a woman in black leans motionless against the stiff folds of her suit. A strand of hair lies across her cheek and her eyes rest on a leaf the cool air brought to the table. Wasted refuse from the night, the leaf lies dead before her as the draft that carried it breathes through her fingers.
           Dry and brittle, the leaf is crossed with veins like the back of her hand. The tips curl in with the curve of her fingers and under pale skin are the stains of work that won’t wash out. Sad eyes curve down toward thin lips and at a glance she might be forty, but she’s only twenty-eight. Withered too soon by a harsh season.
            The leaf on the table is a mirror, in its reflection she sees herself sitting alone in the middle of the night. Sees herself wrapped in the emptiness of life, without friends, without even enemies to notice that hair across her cheek, to smell the new perfume she’s trying, to know she cooks something different every night to fool herself that she has a hobby.
            Her name is Lillian though she doesn’t hear it very often anymore. Most people she talks to don’t know her name. Her family used to call her Lilly, but she hasn’t spoken to them in years, not since she started working for him.
            Lilly knows his name, but never uses it, she only calls him “Sir” or “Lord.” Sometimes she calls him “Master” and he doesn’t seem to mind. For ten years Lilly’s been bound to him, she doesn’t know who did her job before. No one else works for him, Lilly takes care of all his business and she’s the chauffeur when he needs one. At eighty rooms, the manor is too big for her to clean, but she tries to keep it tidy. He doesn’t notice.
            Air from the window moves over Lilly’s face. It smells cool, not the sharp scent of winter, but the warm cool that moves through sleeping trees and across fallen leaves. A wet smell that touches gently with the sad caress of a departing lover.
           Lilly can’t remember the last time anyone touched her. It’s been so long, voices on the radio seem to stroke her skin. When she’s out shopping or tending his business, her fingers ache she wants so badly to touch the sales clerk.
            Sometimes Lilly has dreams about touching the man she works for. They can be innocent, a brush of his body as he moves past. Other times it’s less innocent, and the pleasure is so intense she wakes up sweating.
            Air from the window flows for a moment stronger and the leaf slides closer to Lilly’s hand but stops before touching her. Loneliness seems to surround the bent form, hard shell of life cast from the outside world into the solitude of that house.
            He found Lilly when she was eighteen. Out of school and on her own she had just enough time to feel aimless. It was another Saturday night alone with a book she didn’t care to read when he appeared.
            He hardly spoke, there was no need, his presence was enough. He called to her like the riptide in a hurricane carries lives out to sea. All she could do was follow.
            The phone rings and Lilly jumps from her chair so fast it falls on the floor. No one calls, least of all at night, unless it’s him. He’s away at dinner and wouldn’t call unless there was trouble. Lilly doesn’t care, he was thinking of her, he needs her.
            Lilly grabs the phone and cradles it against her cheek as a woman holds a sleeping child. Turning to the wall she keeps him to herself, as if she’s in a crowded room and this way their conversation is private.
            “Yes, sir?” Lilly whispers, her words glowing like the moonlight outside. She thinks of his ear close to the receiver, so close to her lips.
            “Come to the home of Miss Whitney,” his voice pours out of the phone with the heat of an oven. It runs down her neck, through the shirt and covers her fluttering heart. Lilly touches the cold side of her neck and feels goose bumps.
            “Yes, sir.”