What I actually owed her was the opposite: a woman who kept something for herself, so that my daughter would grow up knowing that she was allowed to, as well.

And one afternoon, I walked back into that jeweler’s in Beacon Hill, alone, and I bought the hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar necklace I had once been told I didn’t deserve.

Not out of spite.

Not to compete with a woman I no longer thought about.

I bought it because I liked it, and because it was beautiful, and because I could — with my own money, earned and inherited and entirely mine, from a father who had tried to make sure I would never have to ask anyone’s permission for anything again.

Chapter 16 — End Meeting