He hit me at my lowest, and discovered, too late, that low is not the same as unarmed.

Chapter 9 — Where the Master Key Is Hidden

I want to explain how a man comes to overlook a thing that large, because it is the whole engine of this story, and it is not as strange as it sounds.

When I married Camden, the Ravenel fortune was a mess — old money badly managed, exposed on a dozen fronts, one bad quarter from serious trouble.

I spent the first years of our marriage rebuilding it.