And beside him, Sabine’s face did something I will remember for the rest of my life: it emptied.

All the honey, all the performance, all the warm certainty drained out of it at once, and for one unguarded second — the truest second of the whole afternoon — I saw her doing the arithmetic, understanding that the powerless woman she had spent the last hour degrading was not a housekeeper at all, and racing to calculate how much I had seen, and heard, and kept.

But I was not finished testing her yet.

Chapter 12 — Play

For three seconds nobody moved.

Then Sabine recovered a second time, and this time she came out swinging.

“This is insane.

You disguised yourself to spy on me?

That is manipulative, Cornelia.” She had dropped the Mrs.

Thornbury now; there was no more use for it.