Ask yourself how many you’ve taken.” No one had ever defended me in that house before or since.

I never forgot it.

And I think, looking back, that Ames saw in me something he had wanted and failed to build in his own son — a person who stayed inside her word when it cost her, who did the hard thing because it was the right one.

When his boy threw out a pregnant wife on a stranger’s word, Ames said nothing at the time, because that was his tragedy and his flaw, the saying-nothing — a man of that generation and that fortune, who had learned to keep the peace of the family above the truth of it, and who would regret the keeping for the rest of his life.

But he did not forget.