So I did not call out.

I set my coat down on the hall table, and I went up the stairs quietly, the old instinct taking over without my deciding anything, moving toward the sound the way I would move toward any disturbance in the ordered world I had built — ready, wary, certain I would find something that needed correcting.

I was right that I would find something.

I was wrong about everything else.

I had no way of knowing, climbing those stairs, that the sound of my mother’s laughter was about to begin the unmaking of the only life I had ever known, and that the woman who had caused it would turn out to be carrying a secret that no amount of money, no amount of power, nothing I had spent my whole life accumulating, could have prepared me to hear.

I have thought, many times since, about how close I came to simply turning around.

I nearly went back down the stairs.

I had a city to run and a hundred urgent things pulling at me, and some part of me sensed, even then, that whatever was behind that door was going to cost me something, and a man in my position learns to be wary of costs he cannot see the shape of.

I went up anyway.

It remains the single best thing I have ever done, and I did it almost by accident.

Chapter 2 — What Money Had Bought

Eight months earlier, my mother, Vivienne Hale, had been diagnosed with stage-four cancer.

I had responded the only way I knew how.

I had thrown money at it, the way I had thrown money at every problem I had ever faced, in the belief, which had never once failed me before, that enough of it could bend any situation to my will.