Corbin climbed the narrow stairwell holding two bulky paper bags of baby supplies, feeling faintly ridiculous — a man who had negotiated contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars without blinking, who had just spent twenty minutes stranded in a pharmacy aisle, genuinely defeated by the number of infant formula brands.

When he reached the third floor and approached her door, he could hear a baby crying softly on the other side of it.

He took a breath, and he knocked.

He had not planned what he would say.

He had come, he told himself, only to leave some help without making her feel ashamed, and then to go, and to let the whole strange evening dissolve back into the ordinary distance between an employer and the woman who cleaned his house.

He did not yet know that the door he was knocking on opened onto the buried truth of his own family’s fortune, and that once it opened, it could not be closed again.