And after all his success, look how he still treats Roslyn like royalty.” The Roslyn she meant was me — Roslyn Bristol, Warner’s wife of eight years, and the woman his family had privately filed under decent, acceptable, but never quite worthy of our golden boy.

I had learned to hear my own name the way you hear a word repeated until it loses meaning.

At that table, Roslyn was rarely a person; it was a slot in a story about Warner — the lucky wife, the fortunate girl, the grateful recipient of a Crandall’s attention.

In eight years Adelina had never once asked me a question about my own work that lasted past the first sentence of my answer.

If a cousin inquired what I did, she would smoothly interrupt to say that a woman’s real vocation was keeping a beautiful home, and steer the conversation back to her son.

I had a mind that companies paid a great deal for.

At that table I was scenery.

And the strangest part, looking back, is how completely I had agreed to it — how a competent woman can be trained, dinner by dinner, to sit quietly at the edge of her own life and call it keeping the peace.

Aunt Gail chimed in around a forkful of potatoes about how grounded he was, how devoted, how lucky I should count myself every night.

My sister-in-law Dinah offered a tight little smile across the table.

“You’ll want to keep him on a short leash, Roslyn.

Men with my brother’s portfolio and face are a hot commodity out there.” Polite laughter rippled around the table, and I laughed with them.

“Yes,” I said, light as a feather.

“He’s very sought after.” Not one of them caught the frost lining the words.