He could have survived a powerful wife; men survived those all the time, learned to fold the fact into the myth, behind every great man. What he could not survive was the sequence of it — that he had spent years telling everyone she was nothing, and she had let him, and now the whole room understood that his certainty about his own wife had been not just wrong but precisely, completely backward.

The man who built everything alone had, it turned out, been carried the entire way by the person he’d been least willing to see.

Chapter 12 — What She Didn’t Say

Lenore reached the microphone.

She thanked the committee for the invitation, spoke about the projects the fund would support, and explained why Havelock had decided to deepen its involvement in children’s hospitals, women’s shelters, and educational scholarships.

She didn’t mention Crispin.