My father, Desmond Parker, had died when I was ten, in what everyone had always called a highway accident.

His company had been quietly dismantled in the months after.

And it was the Ashford family who had stepped in then, who had become our protectors, who had taken a widow and her daughter under their powerful wing.

For eighteen years I had thought of that as kindness.

Sitting in the dark with Olivia’s voice in my ear, I began, for the first time, to think of it as something else entirely — a hand that does not shelter you so much as it keeps you where it can reach you.

It is a hard thing, at twenty-eight, to look back across your whole life and watch it rearrange itself into a shape you never chose.