I have wondered, since, why I let that story stand for as long as I did — why a woman who owned the roof over the Calloways’ heads spent years absorbing their contempt as though it were deserved — and the answer is uncomfortable, and worth telling, because I do not think I am unusual in it.

The story that you are less than you are does not stay outside you.

That is the danger of it.

If a family repeats a story about your smallness often enough, with enough conviction, in enough small daily ways, some part of you begins, against all evidence, to believe it — not the thinking part, which knew perfectly well that I held Voss Capital and thirty-two million dollars of their company, but a deeper, older, more frightened part, the part that had wanted so badly to be accepted by these established, respectable people that it was willing to accept their terms for the acceptance, including their terms about my worth.

I knew, factually, that I was not beneath the Calloways.