The line came to me fully formed, the way the best ones do, and I understood as I said it that I had been composing it, somewhere below thought, since the moment the martini hit my knees.

Theodora had spent the afternoon assigning me a location — below deck, with the service staff, out of sight of her guests.

She had been so certain there was a place I belonged and that it was beneath her.

And she had been right that there was a place, and right that it was fixed, and wrong about nothing else.

My place on that boat, on every boat like it, in every room where the Whitcombes of the world performed their borrowed grandeur, was the same place it had always been.

It was the line at the bottom of the page where the person who actually owns the thing puts her name.