I understood only later, standing in that boardroom soaked from the rain, that the wall I had built to be loved had also been the wall behind which a man had felt safe enough to raise a belt to me.

I need to be honest about why I built it, because it is the closest thing to a real flaw I own in this whole story.

I had watched, growing up, what money did to the people around my father — how it bent them, how it made them perform, how you could never quite tell whether the warmth in a room was for the man or for the fund behind him.

I had decided, young and idealistic, that I wanted one thing in my life that was clean of all that: one person who chose me for myself, knowing nothing of the name or the holdings, loving the ordinary woman and not the access.