It was financial.

If I had been a poor woman with no father worth courting, Rasmus would have said nothing, might even have approved; the cruelty would have been fine, unremarkable, the ordinary running of a household.

What made it a crisis was that Casper had been cruel to the wrong person, the person whose family they needed, and had blown up a business arrangement to do it.

I watched the father rage at the son and understood that I was seeing, in its purest form, the exact machine that had produced Casper — a family in which people were assets and cruelty was acceptable and the only real sin was damaging something valuable.

Casper had learned at this man’s knee that a wife was a thing you controlled.

He was now learning, at the same knee, that you should at least wait to control her until after her father’s introductions had cleared.