“You failed, Corvin.

Thoroughly.”

I said it evenly, and the evenness was the only armor I had, because underneath it the thing I felt was not the satisfaction he would have assumed.

When you are born into a great deal of money, you learn very early that you are, to most people, a door rather than a person — a thing to be gotten through to reach the room beyond.

You learn to watch faces the way other people watch weather, for the small change that comes over them the instant they understand what you are worth.

I had been watched that way my whole life.