The severity my mother despaired of — he called it precision, and prized it.

The coldness that had frightened the men she paraded me in front of — he recognized as focus, the ability to stay clear-eyed in rooms where everyone else was losing their nerve, and he treated it as the most attractive thing about me.

My whole life, the people closest to me had treated my nature as a flaw to be corrected, a set of rough edges that made me unlovable, and had told me so, in a thousand ways, until I half believed it.

And then a man sat down next to me in a dull hall in Geneva and saw the same nature and understood, at once, that it was not a flaw at all.