not self-pity; it’s just the arrangement, and I’d made my peace with it. You clean a person’s house, you learn their life intimately — which drawer sticks, which photos matter, how they take their coffee — and you assume the knowing goes only one direction, that to them you’re a service that arrives and leaves, pleasant enough to have around but not a person whose own life they’d ever track. I never resented Mrs. Whitaker for that. I was grateful for steady work and a kind employer. I asked for nothing more, because women in my position learn not to.
But Mrs. Whitaker had been watching me the whole time. For eight years. And what she’d been watching, it turned out, was a mother quietly breaking herself in half for a child. She’d noticed that I ate lunch in my car — to save the twenty minutes, to not impose, I don’t even
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