She wore no uniform.

She had thought about it, briefly, and rejected it — the uniform would have made it theater, and she did not want theater.

She wanted the truth to arrive plainly and be impossible to argue with.

So she wore black trousers and a crisp white blouse and her dark hair pulled back, and she moved through that ostentatious house with the quiet, contained authority of an officer walking into a command center, and several of the relatives gathered in the great drawing room glanced at her and then glanced again, because something about her that morning did not match the story they had been told.

That was the thing about walking in without the armor of a uniform or the shield of an outburst: it forced them to look at her as she actually was, with nothing to hang their assumptions on.

For two years these people had seen what they expected to see — the grateful nobody, the difficult foreigner, the wife who didn’t quite belong.