And then she began to cry, quietly, the way a person cries who has taught herself not to make noise about it, and the sound of it went straight through me.

I reached down and I picked up the scrub brush out of the bucket, and I threw it across the yard, into the grass, as far as I could throw it.

“You are never kneeling here again,” I said.

I did not shout it.

I said it quietly, so quietly that she lifted her head and looked at me differently, because she heard in it something she had not heard from me before.

Then I took her raw, red hand in mine, very gently, and I walked her toward the patio doors and into the house that I had bought for her, the house where a stranger in a silk robe had just called her a servant, and I made her a promise with every step that I did not say out loud but that I intended to keep with everything I had.