“You warned me.

I needed to see it for myself.”

He had warned me, months before, in the careful way he had learned to say difficult things to a daughter who did not take instruction well — because I had spent a lifetime being told what to do by people with no right to tell me, and he understood that.

He had not forbidden the marriage.

He had not thundered or threatened to cut me off, which is what a different kind of father would have done and which would have driven me straight into Konstantin’s arms out of sheer contrariness.

Instead he had sat across from me one evening and said, quietly, that he had come up in the hotel business alongside men like Konstantin Rasmussen, that he knew the smell of a man who married for leverage, and that he was afraid — not that I was foolish, he was careful to say, but that I was being hunted by someone who had made a study of exactly the kind of loneliness I carried.