That was all.

But I want you to understand that on some days, in the hard years that followed, that sentence was the only thing standing between me and despair, and it had come from a man who owed me nothing but a paycheck, and who chose to give me a family instead.

That word, family, is the one I have turned over most in all the time since, because Mr.

Christopher and I complicate what people usually mean by it, and I think the complication is worth sitting with.

We were not family in any way the law or the world recognizes.

He was my employer; I was his housekeeper; there was money between us, and a vast difference of station, and neither of us ever pretended otherwise.