Silvia I think about sometimes, with something I can only call pity — a woman who got everything she said she wanted and found it was made of nothing.

And me: I run a small clean firm, I sleep without pills, my hands do not shake, and my mind is my own again — sharper, I think, for having once nearly lost it.

People who knew me before sometimes ask if I’m not bitter about how much I lost, and I understand why they ask, because from the outside the ledger looks brutal: a fortune, a company, a marriage, a name that used to open any door in the city, all of it gone in the space of a single terrible year.

But they are counting the wrong things.

They are counting the things my grandfather taught the world to count, the marble and the money and the legacy, and those were never the things that mattered, and holding them had never once made anyone in my family safe or free or able to sleep through the night.

What I actually lost was a cage I’d been raised to mistake for a crown.