What I could not, in the end, forgive was the particular use he put the assumption to — not merely taking my love for granted, which I could have borne forever, but spending it, actively, as currency, to purchase the approval of people who held me in contempt.

There is a difference between a son who forgets to thank his mother and a son who trades her away.

I had raised the first kind, I thought.

At two in the morning I learned I had raised the second.

I was about to teach mine that he had assumed wrong.

Chapter 3 — Six Years Ago

To understand the blue folder, you have to go back six years, to the week everything Steven had built came apart in his hands.

He had been riding high — his own business, his own money, a beautiful fiancee named as the daughter of the well-known Vance family, a wedding being planned on a scale that made the society pages.