She had been placed.

Someone had studied my husband, found the exact shape of the hole in him — the bottomless need to be admired, the dynastic hunger for a son, the vanity that could not tolerate the idea that his wife was the competent one — and had built a person to fit that hole precisely, and slid her into his life like a key into a lock.

Weston Kingsley had looked at the Pembroke Group, at the fortress trust I had built around it, and understood that he could never breach it from the outside.

So he had not tried.