When he found me, I was twenty-six and suspicious of everything, and I did not want to be a headline, or a lottery winner, or a rich man’s rediscovered daughter paraded at galas.

I wanted to know if the connection was real before the money touched it.

So I asked him for something strange: let me keep it private.

Let me learn the company from the bottom.

Let me be, for a while, just an employee named Saoirse, and find out who I am to you when no one is watching.

He had wept, and he had agreed, and for three years we had kept the secret — not out of deception, but out of a daughter’s need to be sure she was loved for herself before she let herself be a Larkhaven.