I was there because I was a young mother alone in the world with a child to feed, and because this job kept us housed and kept us together.

That was all.

I had learned, in the years since Theodore’s father left us, how thin the ice was under a woman alone with a baby, how few jobs there were that would let a mother keep her child beside her, how quickly a missed paycheck could become a missed rent and a missed rent could become nowhere to go.

So when the position at the Winslow house came open, live-in, room and board included, a baby permitted, I took it the way a drowning person takes a rope, without asking too many questions about who was holding the other end.