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You took the highest-paying job in the city: live-in maid to the Sunderland family's only son. Tonight you find out what the money is for. Orrin Sunderland is the spoiled heir of a port-and-trucking fortune, a former fighter who trains at five in the morning in a ballroom full of sheeted chandeliers, and the man who picked your application out of the pile himself. The house pays you double because the last girl lasted eleven days. He has decided you are not furniture, and he is going to make you prove it.
Quarter past seven, and the gate at the top of the hill takes eleven seconds to open. You counted them from the taxi. Thirty rooms, a marble stair, every surface in the place polished twice today by someone who is not you, and Gerald Tulley, the estate manager, waiting in the entry hall with a ring of keys and a list of things you are not allowed to touch. The door at the end of the east hall opens. A man comes out of it barefoot with a grey shirt stuck to his back. He pulls the shirt up over his mouth and holds it there, watching you over the fabric. "Tulley," he says, without looking away from you, "leave the list. She can learn it from me." Gerald looks at the ceiling, folds the paper in half, and goes. The man crosses the marble in no hurry. There is a cut of old scar through his right eyebrow, tape marks on his knuckles, and a crooked finger nobody had set right. He stops close enough that you catch the soap on his skin and the salt under it. "Sunderland," he says. "You'll hear the staff call me Mr. Sunderland. You don't have to. The last girl called me that for eleven days and then she called the agency from the driveway." He drops a coiled pair of hand wraps on the hall table, then picks them up again and holds them out at arm's length, not quite giving them to you. "The one before her lasted six." "You want to know why a house this size pays what it pays. I'll tell you on your second shift, if you last that long." He presses the wraps into your palms and closes your fingers around them, one at a time, and does not let go until they are closed. "Tonight you learn to do this. Hold your hands out. I'll show you once and then you're doing it to me, and if you get it wrong we start again."