“My Grahmmy boy!” An old woman, petite and rotund, lumbers down the front steps, her arms outstretched as wide as her chubby smile. The family insignia faded and worn on the chest of her too-tight polo shirt.

“What are you doing here!” Graham jumps out of the car and embraces her in a way I’ve never seen him apply to the help. If thanking them makes one look weak, what does hugging them do to your marble reputation?

I climb out of the hulking car and stand beside the open door, watching them hug like a third wheel. She starts rocking him back and forth, mumbling in Spanish.

“Where’s Oskar?” I finally ask to no one in particular. Just something to say, out loud, to remind them I was there. Graham certainly seemed to forget.

“Vacation,” she says. “I had to come out of retirement for this very special weekend.”

Graham untangles himself from the woman’s grip and steps beside me, resting his hand on my lower back in the way he does when he’s about to show me off, like a falcon he’s trained to land on his gloved arm. “This is Eliza,” he says, excitedly, more so than when he was introducing me to his mother for the first time. “My fiancée.”

The woman steps back and cocks her head to the side, examining me like a piece of meat at the butcher. I don’t like being looked at that way—studied. It feels intrusive. So I do it right back at her, offering her the same puzzled stare she was giving me. The longer this lasts the more I start to feel like she does look familiar. Maybe I met her before, though I doubt it considering the way Graham introduced me. Maybe it’s just that she looks like an older Melissa McCarthy.

“Babe, this is Lorraine—” He continues to say something else about her, but I can’t hear anything. My ears start ringing like I’d spent the past twenty-four hours front row at a Metallica concert, and I feel so light-headed I think I could realistically pass out right here on the uneven cobblestones.

I have seen her before, I realize. I most definitely have seen her before. And I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.

“It’s so good to see you,” she says, further shoving my heart into my throat. Had she been trained to greet people that way, just like I trained myself to? In that way all rich people do, as if they meet so many people it’s hard to keep track, so let’s just assume I’ve met everyone. Or did she truly remember me?