Mine was earned.

Logan’s came from one of those prominent Upper East Side families — the kind that hosts mandatory Sunday dinners, holds strong opinions on everyone’s business, and never, ever forgets who paid for what.

Unless, of course, the person paying happened to be the daughter-in-law.

Then the ledger, so meticulously kept in every other case, went strangely blank.

I should have read the family more carefully than I did, because a man is, in the end, largely the instructions his family installed in him, and the Sterlings had installed in Logan a very particular operating system.

It ran on one assumption, so deep that none of them could see it as an assumption at all: that the family, and the men of the family especially, were owed things — deference, comfort, the smoothing of their path — and that the role of a wife was to provide those things gracefully and without a bill.