She had been handed everything I was denied — the attention, the approval, the certainty of being wanted — and she had been ruined by it just as surely as I had nearly been ruined by its absence, only more quietly, in a way no one would ever write a story about.

She had been raised to be an ornament, and she had become one, and now the ornament was sitting in the wreckage of a wedding to a bankrupt man, having married a fortune that turned out to be a debt, with no skill in the world to fall back on because no one had ever thought she would need one.

The favorite is not spared the family’s disease.

She only catches a different strain of it.