She had not said it as an accusation.

That was what made it land the way it did.

She had simply laid it down between us, plainly, a fact about her mother and, underneath, a fact about why a secret daughter would take a servant’s job in the house of the family that had never claimed her: not for money, not for revenge, but because she could not bear to watch another woman go the way her own mother had gone, alone and ashamed in a small quiet room, and because mine was the one deathbed in the world where she might be able to prevent it.

Chapter 10 — Why She Came