Every warm memory I had of the Ashfords began, that night, to develop a second meaning, the way a word you’ve heard a thousand times suddenly looks misspelled if you stare at it too long.

The scholarship they’d quietly arranged when my mother couldn’t afford the school — had that been generosity, or a leash?

The internships, the introductions, the careful way doors kept opening for me inside their world and nowhere else — had those been gifts, or fencing, herding me down a corridor that led exactly one place?

Even meeting Nathan, which I had always told myself was chance, the good luck of my sad and fatherless life.

I had to sit in the dark and consider that there had been no chance in it at all, that I had been walked toward him the way you walk a horse toward a particular gate.