So I took my mother’s maiden name, and I moved through the world as Phoebe Hollis, an ordinary woman with an ordinary job, and when I met a charming man who had no idea, I thought I had finally found the clean thing I’d been looking for.

The bitter joke of it, which took me two years and a hospital doorway to understand, is that I had used my father’s fortune as a test — and Rowan had failed it completely, had shown me exactly who he was to a woman he believed had nothing — and I had been too proud, and too invested in the story of my own independence, to read the result.

My father had never been the danger the money posed.

Rowan was.