She was in her late sixties — an age at which a person is traditionally expected to have arrived at some grace.

She had not.

Her nature, which regarded a daughter-in-law as a walking bank account and an unpaid servant, had only hardened with the years.

Three years earlier, my husband, Trevor, had moved her and Bristol out of a cramped, run-down apartment and into my home, rent-free, and Marguerite had spent every day since strutting through my halls as though she were the queen of a castle she had neither built nor bought.

“What did you just say to my daughter, Odette?” she demanded, marching down the stairs and shoving a finger toward my face.

Her voice had the shrill, spoiling-for-a-fight quality of someone who had learned long ago that volume could substitute for being right.