It wasn’t the first time I felt that way. Sophomore year of college, I tagged along with my roommate for spring break at her house in the Outer Banks. She hadn’t warned me that they had a live-in housekeeper and round-the-clock staff—people to clean the pool, trim the edges of the lawn, see to the fish in their giant saltwater aquarium. My friend Kate walked past the people who worked for her with barely a look, as if they were appliances, but their personhood struck me in heat waves every time they came into view. I found myself making my bed in a hurry every morning, folding my towels in just the same triangular pattern their housekeeper used so that she wouldn’t have to do it, picking up Kate’s empty soda cans and busing them to the recycling.

That was how I behaved when I first moved to Alder House—stifled, restless, guilty. In time, nothing changed except me, and the lively air about the house became surprisingly cheery, the way it had been during those years I lived with Gran in her condo, her friends or nurses popping by whenever they felt like it. Eventually, having staff here was just the way of things.

And then, with one BBC News alert, it wasn’t the way of things anymore.

Most volunteered before the draft was even instituted, with a handful of fighting-age adults left to maintain Lute as a strategic outpost, set as we are in the gaping mouth of the Severn. Matthew Clare stayed as well, to do some top secret communications work nobody really understands or asks about. Hugh, just under the age cutoff, agonized over whether to register for service, but when I got pregnant with Emma, he took the loophole that allowed him to stay. When the draft opened up to include women two years ago, I was ready to plead parenthood, but my immigration history meant that I was never even asked. They wouldn’t have trusted an American soldier among the ranks of the European army.

From time to time, we get letters from our staff and neighbors who are off fighting, emails when they have access, letting us know they’re all right. We’re the place the notices come to first when something happens to any of them. We’ve had only one injury so far, a gardener I don’t know well. It sounded horrible—he was hurt by an IED that killed four other men from his squadron—but Hugh brought the message to his sister in the village and came back looking none too bothered by it. It wasn’t much of an injury, apparently, and everybody seems to buy into what Jo was saying: no one from Lute ever dies in war.