I have turned that assumption over many times since, because it is the rotten stone the whole structure was built on, and it is older and more common than the Draycotts. A daughter means weakness. A son carries the name; a daughter is a cost, a dowry, a thing to be married off or provided for or managed.

They had run their entire calculation on it — had decided, before Isla was even born, that because she was a girl she could be discounted, and that because I had produced a girl I could be discounted too, made comfortable, moved aside for the boy who mattered.

And the thing I felt, saying it out loud in that room, was not only anger.

It was a kind of grim wonder at how completely their own contempt had blinded them.