My mother had spent her whole life being the one who served — widowed early, raising me alone on almost nothing, in a small town where a woman’s worth was measured by how little she needed and how much she gave.

She had sold her family’s last piece of land, the land her own parents had left her, to pay for my university, and she had never once mentioned it as a sacrifice; she’d mentioned it, when it came up at all, as simply the obvious thing a mother does.

She did not know how to be waited on.

She did not know how to say no to a request framed as a need.

And Corinna had read all of that in about a day — had seen, in my gentle, giving, self-effacing mother, the perfect mark for exactly the kind of exploitation she specialized in.

My mother had walked into my house as a guest and been put to work within hours, and the most heartbreaking part, the part that made something behind my eyes go white, was that she had let it happen without complaint, because being useful was the only way she had ever known to be safe in someone else’s home.