A woman who cleans your house and serves your table is present for the moments when the performance drops, when the smile falls away between guests, when the cruelty comes out undisguised because the person being cruel does not consider the servant a person worth performing for.

Anouk had watched Dulce for a year with the clear, unillusioned eyes of someone Dulce did not bother to deceive, and Dulce knew it, and it was intolerable to her — this quiet young woman who could not be fooled because she was never courted, who saw exactly what Dulce was and lowered her eyes and kept working.

That, I think, is why Dulce’s cruelty toward her was so particular and so relentless.

It was the resentment of a con artist toward the one person in the house who was never her mark.

And it is a bitter irony that Dulce, in her contempt, never once imagined that the servant she degraded was the only person positioned to destroy her — that the young woman she treated as furniture would prove to be the single human being in that house who would risk everything to save my life.

Chapter 7 — The Kindness