And I put on the faded uniform, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I did not recognize the woman looking back — which meant Sabine would not either.

Then I walked into my own home through the service door, the way the people who actually keep a house like mine running walk into it every single day, and I felt, for the first time in years, the particular invisibility of the uniform.

It is a real thing, that invisibility.

I passed within three feet of a delivery man in the drive and he did not glance at me.

I understood, standing in my own kitchen in a stranger’s clothes, that I was about to see something most people in my position never see: the truth of how the powerful behave when they are convinced the room is empty of anyone who counts.

It unsettled me more than I expected, that invisibility.

I had put on the uniform as a tool, a means to an end, and I had assumed the strangeness would be in the deception — in pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

But the real strangeness was the opposite.

It was in how quickly and completely the world agreed to stop seeing me.

A uniform, I discovered, is a kind of erasure that people perform on your behalf without any effort at all; they simply slide their eyes past the shape of it, the way you slide your eyes past a lamppost.