Flynn had not made a reckless gamble.

He had made a shrewd, cold, well-advised bet, and against ninety-nine women out of a hundred it would have paid.

That is the thing I cannot forgive the world for — not that my husband turned out to be a monster, but that the machinery of the world was built to reward such men, and the only reason it did not was a single sheet of paper signed by a suspicious old man a decade earlier, on the strength of an instinct I had privately thought unkind to my new fiancé at the time.

I owe everything I have to my grandfather’s willingness to be, in that one moment, less generous than I had asked him to be.