Something with which to strike him. Hurt him.

Something sharp, a knife. A tool of some kind, like a screwdriver.

But then reasoning: How could she? How, hurting him, would she not be hurting herself?

The heavy footsteps above her head faded. Mr. Hermann was ascending to the upper floor of the house where (probably) Mrs. Hermann had fallen asleep watching TV, wine bottle and glass on her bedside table.

He was drunk, he didn’t mean it—he likes me …

Juliana lay awake through the remainder of the night. Telling herself that Irving Hermann did like her, at least when sober, Irving Hermann liked her, he’d always smiled at her in an affable sort of way, never had she noticed her employer really seeing her, not in any overtly sexual way, until this night.

Awake, she lay hot-skinned beneath the sheet that felt coarse to her sensitive skin, aroused in a way she could not understand was sexual, or rather knowing it had to be sexual, yet could not understand such arousal, such yearning, a wish to plead to the man for him to forgive her, no, for him to apologize to her, to beg her forgiveness for how he’d touched her, he’d hurt her, did he not understand how he’d hurt her?

In the morning her employer would apologize to her, Juliana thought. The prospect excited her, for it was rare in her life that any adult apologized to her or seemed even to have noticed that she had been insulted.

Hey. Sorry.

Okay.

Is it—okay?

Yes.

But next morning Irving Hermann didn’t come downstairs for breakfast while Juliana was there, taking care of the children. Mrs. Hermann, too, came downstairs late.

Scarcely did Juliana glimpse Mr. Hermann at all that day, hearing footsteps on the stairs, muffled voices at a distance.

There were just a few bruises on Juliana’s face, forearms, wrist, and these were easily hidden. Makeup, sleeves. Hair combed slantwise across her forehead. Mrs. Hermann’s sharp eye saw nothing, Mrs. Hermann suspected nothing. In the maid’s room, when she returned at noon from the beach with the children, Juliana was surprised, though not terribly surprised, to see several bills slid partway beneath the pillow on her bed.

Fifty-dollar bills, unique in her experience. How many?

Five, no six. Six!

He would never approach her again, Juliana knew. Never would he enter the maid’s room again.

Still, Juliana found a screwdriver in one of the kitchen drawers and hid it in her bureau. Clumsy weapon, not really sharp, but if she ever needed it, it might save her life …

But soon then, as if the encounter in the maid’s room had been a turning point and not—as Juliana should have presumed—irrelevant to her employers’ marriage, the couple began to quarrel openly.

Not just muffled voices behind shut doors. Now wicked exchanges like TV dialogue. Escalating profanity, shocking to Juliana’s ear, in the mouths of the well-to-do adults who were her employers.