Every man who had ever courted me had known, first, what I was worth, and I had watched my wealth bend every one of them into shapes I couldn’t trust — the sudden attentiveness, the interest in my “vision,” the way their eyes did arithmetic while their mouths said love.

So I had done something drastic.

I had become someone poor.

I had wanted to know if a man could love me for nothing but myself, unblinded by the fortune, and Jonathan Miller had seemed, across two years of ordinary dates and modest dinners and a courtship in which he believed he was the one with the resources, to be that man.

He had seemed patient and warm and unimpressed by money because he thought there was none to be impressed by.