I needed it.

And because I needed it, I was careful, and quiet, and grateful, and disinclined to make trouble, which was precisely the sort of caregiver a household with something to hide would have wanted.

They did not know they had hired the one person who would refuse, in the end, to look away.

It is a strange thing to reflect on, how completely they misjudged me, and why.

They saw a poor young woman with a baby and a desperate need for the job, and they concluded, reasonably enough by the logic of people like them, that such a person would be easy, would keep quiet, would not risk the one thing keeping her afloat for the sake of a dying stranger who was nothing to her.