For thirty-five years I had built a commercial-property business quietly, deliberately, under a holding company that never once carried my name, because I had learned early that the man whose wealth is invisible negotiates from higher ground than the man whose wealth is known.

Garnet understood that I had money.

He did not understand how much, and more to the point, he did not understand its architecture — that the house he lived in, the office his company leased, and the trust that funded his entire comfortable life were not gifts I had given away, but assets I still held, still controlled, still owned.

He had spent his whole life standing on ground he believed was his, and it had never once occurred to him to check the deed.

Amber, marrying into what she took to be a modest family with one eccentric old father, had done even less checking.