The house looked as imposing and as beautiful as the first day I had seen it eighteen years before.

But something was different this time, and it took me a moment, climbing out of the car, to understand what it was.

For eighteen years, I had arrived at that house through the service entrance on the side — the door for the help, the door you do not see from the drive, the door that says, without a word, precisely where you rank in the household.

I had never once, in eighteen years, walked up the front marble steps and through the great front doors as a person who belonged there.

I walked up them now.

Samuel and I climbed the wide marble steps together, side by side, and he knocked, firmly, three times, on the massive front door of the house that was now mine.