And somewhere in the first year I absorbed, the way you absorb a smell you stop noticing, the family’s central idea: that my success was faintly embarrassing, a thing to be softened and shared and never mentioned, while Camden’s ambitions were the real work of the household, to be funded and believed in.

So I softened it.

I let him be the one the magazine photographed.

I paid for things from an account he didn’t look at, so the money would seem to come from nowhere and cost him no pride.

I made myself the quiet engine in the back of a car he got to drive, and I called that love, and for a while it even felt like it.

That is the trap, and it has almost nothing to do with being smart.