Hattie told me all of this months afterward, sitting across from me at a kitchen table three thousand miles from that house, and she told it slowly, the way people tell the story of the one time in their life they decided to do something brave.

Hattie had kept house for the Prewitts for a long time.

She was not a woman anyone in that family thought about much, which is its own kind of superpower — she saw everything because she’d been taught she was furniture.

She’d buried a husband and raised two children on wages from houses like that one, houses where the people who lived there would not have recognized her at the grocery store, and she’d made a study, across all those years, of the difference between the people who were kind to her and the people who were only kind when watched.

Odette, she’d decided early, was the second kind.