She understood, standing there, that the difference between the two was everything.
Fear had been her whole climate for six years — the low, constant weather of a woman managing a household of people who might turn cold at any moment.
Fear made you small and reactive; it made you apologize before you knew what you’d done.
But organization was something else entirely.
Organization had direction.
It had patience.
It could wait.
And Odette had discovered, in the space of a single evening, that she was extraordinarily good at it — that all those years of anxious documentation, of keeping careful track of every dollar she put into a family that never thanked her, had not been a symptom of her weakness after all.
They had been a skill she had been sharpening the whole time without knowing what it was for.
She thought about what most women in her position would do, and what she was tempted to do herself: the tearful confrontation, the thrown wedding ring, the scene.