THE GLASS
The engagement party was set for eight and by half past seven there were already ninety cars on the lawn.
I had been at the Castellane house since six that morning. Mrs Ivers had me on glassware, which meant I spent the afternoon in the butler's pantry taking three hundred crystal glasses out of felt sleeves and holding each one up to the light for lipstick that was eleven months old.
Mila was with me because my sister's shift moved and there was nobody else. Mrs Ivers said fine, as long as the child stays in the service wing, and I said yes, and Mila stayed in the service wing for exactly four hours, which is longer than most four-year-olds would have managed.
At ten past eight I came out onto the floor with a tray of empties and I could not find her.
I want to be honest about the next thirty seconds, because I have thought about them every day since. I did not think *she is in danger*. I thought *Mrs Ivers is going to see her and I am going to lose this job*.
Then I saw her.
She was standing at the edge of the main room, behind the right elbow of Dominic Castellane, in the pink dress she had worn to my sister's christening, with no shoes on. He had a glass of red wine in his hand and he was lifting it.
There were three hundred people in that room. Violinists near the staircase. Men who own things.
And my daughter reached up and touched the back of his sleeve.
I started walking. I had a tray of eleven glasses in my hands and I remember thinking that if I ran I would drop them, and that dropping them would make people look, and that people looking was the worst thing that could happen.
That is how I was trained to think in that house. Two years of it.
Mila lifted both hands, and even from forty feet away, over the heads of people in evening clothes, I could read every word of it.
*The pretty lady put something bad in your drink.*
The glass stopped a half inch from his mouth.
He did not look at his fiancee. He did not look for me. He looked down at a four-year-old and he held perfectly still, and I understood, in the middle of that room, that Dominic Castellane could read her.