By morning I had decided the problem was one of order.

A housekeeper had overstepped.

She had been hired to clean, and instead she had inserted herself into the most private part of my family’s life, had made herself necessary to my dying mother, and a thing had happened under my roof that I had not authorized and did not control.

That was the part I fixed on, because it was the part I knew how to feel.

It was easier than the other thing, the thing I had felt standing at the door, which I did not have a name for yet.