He had looked at me for twenty years and seen a soft thing, a daughter, an heiress, a distracted woman married to a controlling man, and he had never once revised that picture against the possibility that the soft thing was watching him back.

Arrogance is not stupidity; Charles was not stupid.

Arrogance is a failure of imagination — the inability to conceive that the person beneath you might be your equal, or your better, quietly waiting.

That failure was the only weakness he had, and it was the only one I needed.

I did not defeat Charles Mercer with a cleverer scheme, though the scheme was clever.

I defeated him with his own inability to imagine me.