I learned that trusting again after Desmond was not naivety but courage — that the person who refuses to ever trust again has simply let the betrayer win a second, quieter victory.

And I learned to hold the grief for the child that never came as its own true thing, separate at last from the man who had used it, a real sorrow I was allowed to feel without it being a weapon turned against me.

That separation was the hardest surgery of all, and no court could have performed it.

Only time, and the slow, unglamorous work of letting myself heal, ever could.

Chapter 26 — The Architect

A year later, I stood in my office on the top floor of my family’s company — my office now, the title returned to me by a board that had watched me save the whole enterprise with nothing but documents and nerve — and looked out over the city as the sun came up over the foothills.