He looked at me behind those bars and he saw a proud woman, humiliated — a thing tamed, a spirit that had defied him and been put in its place at last.

What he could not see, because his imagination did not contain it, was that pride is not the same as vanity, and that a proud woman in a cage is not a defeated woman; she is a woman whose pride has just been given a reason.

Roman understood people only as far as their appetites.

He could read what a person wanted — money, love, status, safety — and he could offer it or withhold it, and by that lever he had moved everyone in his life, including, for seven years, me.

But he had no concept of a person moved by something other than appetite; the idea of a woman who would spend two years and every ounce of herself not to gain anything but simply to make a true thing known was, to him, literally unimaginable.