Amalia had no formal education past the age of sixteen, but she had built an estate out of nothing across fifty years, and she had exactly one law that she repeated to me so often it became the rhythm of my childhood: read to the bottom of the page, mija.

The truth is always in the part they hope you’ll skip. She meant contracts, leases, the documents that men in good suits slid across tables expecting her to sign on trust.

She had watched people underestimate her whole life — a woman, an immigrant, a widow — and she had turned that underestimation into her sharpest tool, because a person who thinks you are too foolish or too tired or too polite to read the fine print will put the truth right there in it, confident you will never look.

Damon had made exactly that bet about me.