They wanted the eighteen percent of the company that came attached to me, and the cleanest way to control a bloc of voting shares is to control the person who holds them, and the oldest and ugliest way to control a woman is to bind her, legally and personally, to a man who will vote as instructed.

That is what the marriage was.

It was a mechanism for the transfer of corporate control, and I was the instrument through which the transfer would be routed.

Flynn saw it instantly, with the cold clarity of a man who reads deals for a living, and he called it what it was: not a courtship, but an annexation.

And I think naming it that way was, in its own way, a kindness — because it stripped the last shred of romantic disguise off the thing that had been done to me, and let me see, without any softening, that I had not been the object of anyone’s affection or even anyone’s cruelty.

I had been the object of an acquisition.