She did not say she had told me so.

She did not ask why it had taken me three years to see it.

She simply put her arms around me, with my father standing quiet in the foyer behind her.

For years Spencer had told me my family despised him for his modest beginnings, and there was a grain of truth in it — my father had been hard on him when he came to ask for my hand, had said outright that he would not bless a marriage to a man who seemed far more interested in the Sinclair name and its corporate reach than in me.

I had called my father a snob.