So I stepped out of it.

I stopped seeing a romantic rival and started seeing a situation — a set of legal facts, financial structures, reputational exposures, and human weaknesses, arranged in a particular configuration that could be understood and, understood, rearranged.

My father used to say that the Sinclairs had kept their money for four generations not by being the smartest people in any room but by being the calmest, by declining to make decisions from inside their feelings.

I had spent eleven years forgetting that I was one of them.