Ann tried not to smile. “I’m Ann.” She reached her hand to her employer and looked him in the eye. He smiled—a cordial smile that gave nothing away. He shook her hand. His grip was firm and forceful, sweaty. His middle finger reached toward her wrist. She tried to shake her hand loose but he gently tightened his grip and held it a few seconds longer, long enough for her to remember the feeling of his callused fingers on the back of her neck when he tugged her ponytail holder loose, long enough to linger without Maureen, who busied herself straightening up the cushions, taking no notice. “I’ve heard you’re a terrific babysitter,” he said, and smiled.

Maureen walked away and applied another coat of lipstick in the hallway mirror. “Caged animals, that’s what they are. Especially this time of night.”

“You need to let the tiger out of the cage,” Anthony said.

“Our reservation is in ten minutes,” she said. “I just need to get my purse.” She practically skipped down the hallway that led to their bedroom.

“Ah, nice color,” Anthony said, pointing at Ann’s toes. She’d painted them with the closest shade of pink she could find, given the limited selection at the General Store. She looked at him, feeling both bold and embarrassed, and smiled.

Anthony turned his attention to Brooks and Toby, who had run back into the family room. “You’ll behave for Ann tonight, right?”

“Right,” they said in unison.

Anthony walked over to the couch and picked up a needlepoint pillow with the word COTTAGE stitched into it. “This is new,” he said. “I wonder what my father would think of it.”

He tossed it to Ann, who caught it.

“He worked third shift in the Enlow Fork coal mine.”

“Where’s that?”

“Pennsylvania. Coal country. He supported us on twelve bucks an hour. Every day, he went six hundred and fifty feet underground. It was dark. Machines with teeth as big as you are chewed a hole in the ground. At any moment, something could explode or collapse. He came home looking like the earth swallowed him up and spit him back out. When he was my age, his eardrums were ruptured, his kidneys shot. His spine was a zigzag. He died of black lung.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am too.” Anthony’s voice broke. “He was a great guy. The best, and he pissed his life away trying to provide for us. And now here I am, just a coal miner’s son, with a pillow that says ‘cottage.’ If we had a pillow like that in the house I grew up in, it would say ‘shithole.’”

All this time she’d thought of herself as the poor intruder into Maureen’s tidy world. Now she felt, well—not rich, but fortunate.