I had not hidden it from him, not really.

I had simply declined to insist on it, and he had been more than happy to fill the silence with the flattering version.

My mother had warned me about men like him, though I had not understood it at the time.

She had built her firm from a small inheritance and an uncompromising idea — that capital should build things, not strip them — and she had run it for twenty-seven years with a spine of pure steel inside a very soft voice.

When I married Damian, she had looked at him across the dinner table for a long moment and then said to me later, privately, only one thing: Keep the firm in your name.