Not a rival, not some dramatic lover waiting to carry me off, no man at all.

Only the plain fact, in ink, that every ounce of the power he had spent six years flaunting had flowed to him from a family he had tried to defraud, and had now flowed back to its source, and that the quiet wife had been that source the entire time.

I watched it reach him, and I understood that it was the single thing capable of reaching him, because it struck at the one belief his whole self was built on.

Flynn had spent his life certain that power was something a man like him generated — by force of will, by charm, by working later and wanting it harder than the people around him.