And then, slowly and then all at once, it collapsed.

A bad partnership, a worse loan, a market that turned at the wrong moment, and my son found himself facing not just failure but ruin — bankruptcy, the public kind, the kind that would have ended the engagement and the standing and the entire glittering life he had built, before it had properly begun.

He came to me.

Of course he came to me; I was his mother, and I had money, having spent thirty years building Sterling Holdings from nothing into something, alone, after his father left us with little more than a name.

And I did what I had sworn, when he was a baby in my arms, that I would always do.