Chapter 1 — A Family Dinner

The first time my stepmother tried to sell me, she served champagne and called it a family dinner.

I was twenty-four years old, seated at a long table across from a man named Luca Vance — sixty-one, an investor, with the kind of polished, practiced smile that has learned to look like warmth.

And my stepmother, Wendy Sterling, sat beside him with the serene poise of a woman presenting a quarterly report to shareholders, which, I would come to understand, was very nearly what she believed she was doing.

“Luca is prepared to cover our bridge financing,” Wendy said, in the smooth voice she used for closing deals.

“In return, you’ll make the arrangement respectable.”

I set down my fork.

Something in the phrasing had gone cold and wrong.

“What arrangement?”

Luca lifted his glass, unhurried, as though we were discussing the weather.

“Marriage,” he said, “eventually.

Exclusivity, immediately.”

And the champagne went to ice in my stomach, because I understood, all at once, exactly what was happening at that table.

The company Wendy was trying to save had been my father’s — Sterling Global, built by his hands over a lifetime, before he died and left it, and me, in the care of a woman who had just, over a candlelit dinner, named the price of her rescue.

And the price was me.

I was not a guest at that dinner.

I was the item on the agenda.

I was the collateral.