And I understood that this, too, was part of the debt I owed her, and part of the thing I had learned.

For six months, Elena had cleaned my home, and I had called her nothing at all, because I had not known her name, because I had never once looked at her long enough to learn it.

She had been, to me, exactly what she had been to Chloe: a presence so far beneath notice that I had lived alongside it for half a year without registering that it was a human being with a brother, and a conscience, and a life.

And that same woman had turned out to be the one who saw me clearly when no one else did, who acted to save me when everyone else moved to profit from my death.