I was young and in love and it felt almost disloyal to Camden to keep a wall standing between his life and a part of mine.

My grandmother had lived through a different era, one where a woman’s security evaporated the day she signed a marriage license, and I’d assumed her caution was a relic.

I kept the trust separate to honor her, not because I thought I would ever need it — the way you keep a smoke detector you’re sure will never go off.

She grew up watching her own mother handed nothing after forty years of marriage, watching aunts talked out of their inheritances by charming men, and she had decided that her granddaughter would have at least one thing in the world that no husband could reach, no matter how the story went.

I stood on the sidewalk outside the courthouse the day I set up Ardmore Holdings and felt vaguely guilty about it.