To the financial world he is a nearly invisible man — the kind of power that does not appear in magazines, the chairman of a family group that controls Crestview Partners through a quiet lattice of holdings, the sort of person whose name means everything to the few hundred people who need to know it and nothing at all to everyone else.

To Gavin, for six years, my father had simply been “Mr.

Howard” — a reserved, unremarkable older man he met at holidays, was mildly polite to, and never once took the trouble to actually know.

I had made very sure of that.

I had spent my entire marriage working to maintain Gavin’s ignorance, letting him believe my family was ordinary and my father was no one in particular, because some part of me — a part I am still, honestly, untangling — wanted to be loved as a plain woman and not as an heiress.

I had built the wall myself, brick by brick.