I want to be fair to Isabela, because in the end she behaved with more honor than anyone in either of our families, and she deserves to be more than the woman I was leaving.

We had met the way people like us met — introduced at a benefit by parents who had already, we later understood, sketched the outlines of a merger on the backs of their guest lists.

Our courtship had been pleasant and hollow, a series of correct dinners at correct restaurants, both of us performing an enthusiasm neither of us felt because performing was what we had each been raised to do.

I think we both knew.

I think, on some level, Isabela had known from the first dinner that she was marrying a strategy rather than a man, and had decided, as I had, that this was simply what her life was going to be — that women in her family did not get to marry for love any more than men in mine did.

There was a kind of grim solidarity in it.