He loved his name over the door.

What he never mentioned, to anyone, was that he ran a company he did not control — and that the woman he had just ordered to cook dinner for his mistress owned the ground he was standing on.

There is a particular arrangement that certain men make with the world, and Roman had made it perfectly, and it is worth naming because it is so common and so rarely seen for what it is.

He had taken my money — my grandmother’s money, the trust she spent her life building so that I would never be at any man’s mercy — and he had used it to build a thing, and then he had put his own name on that thing, and then he had let the world, and eventually himself, forget whose money it had been.