The Vances spent their whole lives obsessed with who carried their blood, who deserved the ring, who was worthy of the name.

And the person who turned out to have the most honor of anyone in that garden was the woman they paid by the hour and never once truly saw.

If there is a lesson in that beyond the obvious one, it is this: watch, always, how a family treats the people it considers beneath it, because those people see everything, and remember everything, and are, very often, the ones who turn out to matter most.

The Vances were undone, in the end, not by a rival or a regulator but by the invisible woman in the kitchen doorway — because she was the only one among them who had never stopped being able to tell right from wrong.

Chapter 7 — The Dying Marriage

My marriage did not die the day I learned about Selina.