I used my maiden name in the work not to hide it from Lucan — that had never been the point at the start — but because my mother had built Solstice under the name Ingram, and I had wanted, when I took over her life’s work, to carry it forward under the name she’d made it under.

My mother had started the firm in an era when a woman raising capital was a novelty to be condescended to, and she had done it anyway, and built it into something that could pull an eight-hundred-person company back from the edge of liquidation.

She died the year before I married Lucan.

Running Solstice was the last conversation I got to keep having with her — every deal I closed was a thing I could imagine telling her about, every company I saved was her hand still working through mine.

And Lucan had looked at all of that, the whole inheritance of my mother’s brilliance and my own work, and seen a hobby.

A modest little thing his wife did.