Florence gave me the whole curriculum in a single grey bucket on my wedding night.

I did not thank her, then.

But I understand now that she saved me a decade, and I have tried, since, to feel something almost like gratitude toward the woman who despised me enough to show me exactly what she was in the first hour, while I still had my suitcase packed and the strength to lift it.

Chapter 2 — I Was Not Hired as Your Servant

I stood up, in my wedding dress, and I kept my voice level, because I had already learned in business that whoever stays calm in a room controls it.

“Florence,” I said.

“I married Jonathan today.

I was not hired as your domestic servant.” Her face went from cold to incandescent in the space of a breath, and she began to shriek — a practiced, room-filling shriek of a woman who has gotten her way for decades by simply making the alternative too loud to bear.

I understood, watching her, that this was a woman who had never once in her life been told no by anyone in that house, and that my quiet refusal had short-circuited something in her that had no other setting.

I was not frightened.

I have sat across boardroom tables from men who could have bought and sold this entire family a hundred times over, men who tried to break me with far more sophisticated weapons than a bucket and a scream, and I had learned to meet all of it with the same flat calm.

But I will admit that I was, in that moment, still hoping — still telling myself that Jonathan, when he came, would walk into this room and see what I saw, and put a stop to it, and be the man I had spent two years believing he was.

I had built my whole test on the possibility of that man.

I was about to find out he had never existed.