The phone rings sharp through the halls of the house, threatening to shatter the glass cabinet fronts and all the fancy tchotchkes behind them, but she’s still got her talons clamped to my jaw and doesn’t let me go until she purrs, “That must be Ted running early with the prints. Keep your seat—I’ll speak to him.”

Her breast brushes my shoulder when she reaches for the phone. I think about teddy bears—the soft ones that little kids take to bed and the hard ones that grown-up women collect. Mrs. Tyburn has the second kind.

While we finish our tea Mrs. Tyburn gives me a few more notes. As she talks, new things occur to her, dozens of details to make her daughter’s childhood happier, so many that I have to ask her to slow down.

“I suppose they don’t teach young women shorthand anymore. This must be difficult for you.”

Last of all, for the time being at least, I have to deal with Sophia’s clothes. Mrs. Tyburn wants her daughter to wear “brighter colors” (which means more pink), and finds it odd that she wore corduroys when it was obviously too hot. (I tug my sweaty bra line and see her point.) Is there anything I can do about this? Of course, I tell her. That’s what I always say. Nothing she asks is impossible. I clear up and take my notes to the impromptu edit suite she has set up for me in her attic. I like to pretend I’m that character from A Little Princess, working away with a beacon of optimism keeping me going: the storybook knowledge that my daddy will return from whatever war that was, shake off his amnesia, and come for me.

This room is different from the rest of the house, where everything looks one-of-a-kind and carefully made. The attic makes me feel rejected, like she doesn’t really want me in her house. But there’s nowhere else to put me. Story of my life. In here the furniture is new and cheap. The L-shaped desk and the adjustable office chair are from Ikea and could sit in any room, anywhere. The plastic-wood drawers have plastic-metal handles. There’s no inkwell carved into dark wood or little decorative things with tiny clockworks that jingle and bing for no reason.