The one who prepared the financial reports, and dressed plainly, and lacked entirely the easy confidence of my older brother, Caleb, the admired golden son, the anointed future head of Vance Development Group.

They believed I had left the family business two years earlier because the pressure of it had simply become too much for me, because I was too soft, too sensitive, too delicate for the ruthless world of real business.

That was the story they told, and the story they believed, and, I think, the story they needed to believe, because it confirmed everything they had always assumed about me.

It was not the truth.