Every compliment landed exactly where a compliment would do the most work.

It was not that she was unkind to me — she was extravagantly kind to me — it was that the kindness had a direction, the way water has a direction, always flowing toward the thing it wanted.

I told myself I was being a suspicious old woman.

I told myself that my son was happy, that I did not get to choose his wife, that the coldness I sensed under the shine might be nothing more than my own reluctance to let him go.

I told myself all of that.

And then Verena came to me.

Chapter 5 — What the Staff Knew

Verena had run my house for eleven years.

She was calm, discreet, and not remotely given to drama, which is exactly why what she told me landed the way it did.

“She calls them animals, ma’am,” she said quietly, one evening, after the others had gone.