Within the hour Sabine had found me and put me to work, and the work itself was not the point — the point was the pleasure she took in the ordering.

She had me carry six heavy garment boxes up the main staircase, one at a time, and stood at the top watching, and when I was slow on the fifth she sighed the theatrical sigh of a person performing her own patience.

She mocked my accent, which I had roughened for the occasion, repeating a word I’d said and laughing at it, glancing around for an audience that wasn’t there.

She found small ways to make me wait, to make me fetch, to make me smaller.

None of it was large.

All of it was information.

I want to describe this carefully, because cruelty of this kind is often invisible precisely because no single instance of it looks like much.

If you had walked in on any one moment — a woman asking a housekeeper to re-carry a box, a slightly sharp word about an accent — you would have seen nothing worth remarking on.

It is only in the accumulation, in the steady downhill direction of all of it, that the shape appears.

She was not stressed about a wedding.