He had been my mother’s older brother, a quiet, exacting man who talked to me like an adult when I was still a child and who had watched my marriage into the Draycott family with a reserve I had mistaken, at the time, for disapproval of me.

I understood now that it had never been disapproval of me.

It had been a clear-eyed reading of them, and of what a family like that does to a person who marries in without leverage of her own — and he had done something about it, quietly, years ago, and told no one, and waited.

I thought, that night, about the last real conversation I’d had with Rutger, a few months before he died.

We had sat on the porch of the old house he’d never bothered to make grand, and he had asked me — plainly, in the way that had always unsettled the Draycotts, who preferred their meanings folded — whether I had my own money.