He laughed — a real laugh, low and delighted, a sound that did something inconvenient to my chest — and he said, “Marry me, Josephine.

I need someone who can keep up with my balance sheets.” It was a joke, that first time.

It stopped being a joke somewhere over the following year, in the stolen hours between one crisis and the next, the way the truest things in a life usually arrive: as a joke you both slowly realize you meant.

What undid me about Zachary, in the end, was not his money, of which I had my own, and not his power, of which the same was true.

It was that he was the first person in my life who looked at the exact qualities my family had spent thirty years trying to file down, and found them beautiful.