Damian had learned, at enormous cost and very late, the one lesson his whole gilded life had been arranged to keep from him.

Wealth, he had discovered, could buy influence, and land, and power, and the deference of nearly everyone.

It could not buy back a single lost second.

And real strength — the kind he had spent forty-four years mistaking for the ability to leave — had never once been about riding in to rescue someone.

It was about standing beside them.

It was about believing them when no one else would.

And it was about the moment, the one that always comes, when it would be so easy, so reasonable, so defensible to walk away — and choosing, instead, at last, to have learned how to stay.