I did not need to lift a finger against any of them.

I only needed to stop managing their lives.

Because I had, it turned out, been managing far more of the Sterling family than any of us had ever acknowledged.

Without my salary funding the automated transfers, the maintenance fees on Logan’s condo simply went unpaid.

Eleanor discovered she now had to pay for her own therapy.

And the family began to realize, one uncomfortable gap at a time, how much of the machinery of their comfortable life I had been running — the dinner reservations, the holiday planning, the vendor deposits, the social calendars, the ten thousand small logistical acts that had made their world glide, all of which I had performed so smoothly that none of them had ever noticed it was being performed at all.