For five years I had been the foundation of their lives — the earnings that paid for the penthouse, the labor that ran the household, the money that funded the parties and bought the pearls and drew the admiring relatives.

I held all of it up, from below, where no one looked.

And a foundation, unlike a penthouse, has a terrible power that its residents never suspect: it can leave.

It can withdraw itself, one morning, with a set of car keys and a divorce petition, and walk out into the daylight — and everything that was built on top of it, all the importance and the comfort and the borrowed grandeur, comes down at once, into a heap on a wet sidewalk, surrounded by garbage bags and thawing dinners.

They thought they were the building.

They were only the part of it you could see.