The girl opened the glass door and stepped into the small garden where a waterfall spilled into a pond and the captive butterflies began their morning dance. Dozens of them in all different colors and sizes flitted about the tops of the red and yellow flowers. Sometimes one might land on her head or on her outstretched hand.

Every morning it was her duty to wipe clean the glass walls and throw out any dead butterflies or debris. For the rest of the day she would scrub floors, do the cook’s bidding, wash the dishes, dust the furniture, make the beds, and launder the underclothes of the upstairs girls. But in the mornings she had this short-lived reprieve, this moment to breathe, to feel the sunshine through the glass enclosure.

She knelt down and found an orange and black butterfly almost as big as her palm on the pebbly ground. She stroked the soft wings, wishing she could will it back to life, and marveled at its beauty. She was lucky, she supposed, not to be beautiful. Señora Mariposa said that with the sprawling red splotch on her neck since birth, her dull brown hair, and her snub nose, she was too ugly to work upstairs.

“Why did they even send you?” the Señora wondered aloud when she first saw the girl. “You’re old enough for the work, but no man who comes here would want you. It must have been night time when they took you.”

The Señora was right. The girl had just stepped out of an apothecary on a bitter January night when someone grabbed her and covered her face with a piece of cloth drenched in a scent so sharp it was like a knife to the brain. A minute later the world went dark. She’d woken up in the hold of a ship and now she was in a country where she did not speak the language, in a house where a girl could wear pretty clothes and lie down with different men every night or she could scrub the floors like a slave. She was the slave.

The girl finished her work in the garden and reluctantly went back into the house. In the parlor, overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses littered the tables. The chandelier and piano needed dusting. The tile floor needed to be polished on hands and knees.

Books filled a bookshelf against the wall, but they were only for show. She was allowed to dust them but not to read them. She used to read books to Mrs. Patterson in the evenings. It was the best part of her job as companion to the blind woman. She looked at the books with longing, curious about the stories they contained.

Around noon the upstairs ladies would start calling down for coffee and cakes. She had better get to work. If she didn’t, she’d be tossed out into the street without a cent to her name, the Señora told her. Plenty of local girls would want her job, she said. So the girl cleaned out the ashtrays, gathered the empty glasses onto a tray, and wondered if Mrs. Patterson missed her.