Wendy Vance was, by any conventional measure, enormously powerful.

She had money, and lawyers, and investigators, and a criminal organization, and the ruthless will to use all of it.

My husband and I had none of those things; we had a new baby, a modest home, and each other.

By the ordinary arithmetic of power, it should not have been a contest.

And yet she lost, completely and permanently, and the reason she lost is worth understanding.

She lost because her entire power depended on having something to hold over people, and she had built her whole approach to Luca on the assumption that she still held the two things that had controlled him for years: his fear, and his secret.