Once I understood, I did not confront Natalie.
I did the thing my mother’s twenty years of scrubbing floors had taught me: I found out exactly who someone is before I decided what to do about them. And I gave the person who’d been wronged the dignity of being part of it.
I talked to Elena.
I did it carefully — I didn’t want to frighten her, and I didn’t want to put her in a worse position than Natalie already had. I found her one evening after her class, and I told her, simply, that I knew Natalie had been mistreating her, and that I was sorry, and that I wanted to understand what had been happening in my own house while I wasn’t looking.
Elena was cautious at first — of course she was; she was a housekeeper being asked to speak against the future lady of the house, with a sick mother and a young brother depending on her paycheck.
