About being told they were imagining it.

About having no money and nowhere to go and three children and no one who would stand between them and the person hurting them.

I recognized every one of them. And I understood, reading, that my particular private nightmare — the one Agatha had counted on staying private, because who would believe a servant — was not rare at all.

It was common as dirt. It had only ever been made to feel like my personal shame.

Watching thousands of strangers set their own shame down at once, out loud, in public, I felt something in me that had been clenched for six years finally let go.

Agatha tried, one last time, to get ahead of it — claiming Bruce had invented the whole thing to cover for my theft.