I squeezed Ezekiel’s hand and leaned my head against his shoulder, and we stepped out of the chapel into the warm, bright Charleston afternoon.

Chapter 15 — The Only Real Man in the Room

My father had believed, his whole life, that money was proof of a man — that power was a matter of how many people you could make small.

I thought about that, standing in the sunlight with my husband’s arm around me.

My father had spent six months calling Ezekiel a nobody, and he had been so certain, so loud about it, that for a while even I had felt the weight of his certainty.

And the whole time, the man he was mocking had been quietly holding a line that my father, with all his money, could never have held for a single day — had taken on billion-dollar companies for families who had nothing, for free, at real risk to himself, and won.