It was unmistakably, impossibly her — the woman who had vanished out of my life six years ago without a word, and whom I had spent six years trying to bury under grand openings and investor dinners and the relentless forward motion of my own life.

Chapter 3 — The Comforting Explanation

To understand why the sight of her stopped my heart, you have to understand the story I had been told about her, and the story I had let myself believe.

I had met Rosalind six years earlier, when she was coordinating charity galas for my family’s foundation here in Minnesota.

I was thirty-five and she was thirty-one, and what undid me about her, from the first evening, was that she was not the least bit intimidated by any of it — not the money, not the name, not the weight of the family I came from.

She challenged me when she thought I was wrong.