If Teresa had taken the leave and the counseling and the lawyer and then chosen never to return, and told me plainly that the house held too much fear for her now, I would have accepted it without a word of complaint and considered every cent well spent.

The whole point was that the choice had to be hers, entirely and without pressure, because Vanessa had spent months stripping Teresa of choices, and the beginning of undoing that was to hand as many of them back as I could.

She took three months to recover, on her own timetable and no one else’s, and in that time two former members of my household staff came forward, entirely on their own initiative, to tell me that Vanessa had tried the same quiet strategy with them, sowing distrust and manufacturing small grievances to isolate anyone who might one day notice something wrong and warn me.

It had been a strategy, not an accident.