I was too broken to do anything else.

By the time I understood what was happening, it had already happened. Agatha had taken our apartment.

She had claimed David’s life insurance payout, every cent of it, saying it would go toward his debts.

She had even taken the few family heirlooms my own mother had left me — a locket, a ring, a set of silver — for “safekeeping,” and I never saw them again.

And she had installed me and my daughters in the smallest room in her enormous house: a damp, windowless space beside the laundry room, where the walls sweated when the machines ran and the air always smelled of bleach.

In exchange for that room, I worked.

I cooked, I cleaned, I served, I scrubbed floors on my knees, from before dawn until after the household slept, and I was never paid a dollar.

Agatha called it family. She said I was earning my keep, that she was being generous, that a lesser woman would have thrown me and my “burdens” out onto the street.

That was her word for my daughters. Burdens. Three useless girls, she called them, in front of them, again and again — three failures who proved I had ruined her son’s life by never giving him a son of his own.

As if the fact of their being girls were a debt I also owed her, and could never repay.

My Olivia was eight. Erica was six. Holly had just turned four. They were the entire reason I got up in the morning, and the entire reason I did not walk out that front door, because I had nowhere to take them and no money to take them there, and Agatha knew it, and used it, every single day.

The night she slapped me, I had been awake since four in the morning.