It is much easier to build a company than to admit a thing like that about yourself.

I built the company first.

The admission took another three years, and a hot kitchen, and my mother’s face.

Chapter 16 — The Curb

Corinna’s instinct, when cornered, was to make it a spectacle.

She planted herself on the concrete curb outside my gate and began to wail — that I was starving a helpless old woman, that she’d taken me in like a daughter, that I’d turned cruel.