Chapter 2 — Sunniva

My name is Sunniva.

I was twenty-nine, and I had spent six years building an advertising and event-production agency in Chicago — started on a borrowed laptop with two small clients, and grown now to forty-six full-time staff.

Which was why, much as I loved Percival Pembrook, I had never once understood his quiet, persistent suggestion that I step back and let him run my company after we married.

That November afternoon I drove out to meet his parents formally for the first time, at their estate in Highland Park.

His mother, Ottavia, was a retired professor.