And for a while, a wonderful while, it had worked exactly as she’d hoped: a man had loved the woman and not the fortune, and she had let herself believe she had found the one relationship in her life that was real.

She understood now what she had actually done.

She had handed a man a test he did not know he was taking, and she had spent eight years watching him fail it a little more each day.

Her grandmother had warned her, in a way.

Ottilie Danforth had been a formidable woman — she had built the whole enterprise in an era that gave a woman like her nothing but obstacles — and near the end of her life she had said something to Isadora that had sounded, at the time, like ordinary grandmotherly caution and revealed itself, over the following decade, to be something closer to prophecy. Money is a mirror, the old woman had said. It doesn’t change a person.

It just lets you finally see what they were always going to be, once they stopped having to pretend. Isadora had not fully understood it then.