My relief at my unexpected foresight in getting Justine hired was immense. I had relatively little to do with Ernest, now attending school in town, and young William. Sweet though they were, children remained to me a foreign language that I could speak and understand but never felt comfortable with.

Justine flourished. She would have done the work of five household servants, but I did not let Judge Frankenstein realize that. She was not of low birth, after all.

In fact, I secretly suspected she was of higher birth than I.

Though I had kept my fears to myself all these years, with Victor gone and Madame Frankenstein dead, they bubbled to the surface whenever I ate a meal alone with Judge Frankenstein. With every delicate bite I took, every impeccably mannered sip of a drink, I wondered whether it would show. Whether he would know. Whether he already suspected.

They had bought me based on a lie.

It had to be the case. Looking back, it was laughable, really. Madame Frankenstein had told me the story they were given. It made no sense. How would a violent mite of a woman living in poverty in the woods come into possession of an imprisoned Italian nobleman’s daughter? Her story, woven of political woes and Austrian-seized fortunes, was as juvenile as something I would tell to get William to quiet and go to sleep. “The beautiful wife died bringing an even more beautiful daughter into the world! And though she was an angel, her father, bereft and angry, could not give up his righteous fight against those who had wronged him! Taken far away to a dark dungeon, the father left his daughter to be raised in meanness and the lowliest estate, until the day a kind and generous family found her and instantly knew she had been born to more than that.”

I would burn a book that defiled my mind with such trite nonsense. Instead, the more likely story: The woman had inherited me from a sister or a cousin. She resented another mouth to feed. When the Frankensteins took up residence at Lake Como and she saw their young son, she seized her opportunity. Took the pretty child and sold her, complete with newly brushed hair and a shining story to wrap her up in.

So it was that my mind was already gnawing anxious circles around my origin when Judge Frankenstein, gaunter and obviously in poorer health since the death of his wife, actually addressed me at dinner six months after Victor had left.

“Tell me, what do you remember of your father?”

My spoon paused halfway to my lips. I set it down so he would not see it tremble. He had indulged his wife for years, but she was gone now. Victor was fixed. The judge had no reason to keep me. What was I, after all, but a worthless stray whose usefulness was past?