I had been ashamed of the wrong thing my whole life.

And I want to sit with that, because unlearning that shame was the real work of the year that followed, harder than the audit or the divorce, and more important.

For as long as I could remember, I had carried the Voss name like a stain — had softened my voice and my presence and my whole self in an effort to prove I was not what people feared when they heard it.

I had married Preston, in part, I can admit now, because the Calloways were respectable in exactly the loud, established, unfrightening way my own family was not, and some wounded part of me believed that marrying into their respectability would launder me, would finally make me the acceptable kind of person, would put the shadow behind me.