She understood it completely now.

She had spent eight years holding a mirror behind her back, and tonight she had finally turned it around, and the reflection was standing at a charity gala with another woman on his arm.

There had been a purity to her intention that she still did not regret, even knowing how it ended.

She had wanted, more than she had ever wanted any deal or any building, to be loved as a person — to know, just once, that a man’s warmth was for her and not for the doors her name could open.

It was the one thing all her money could not buy her, and so she had done the only thing she could think of: she had hidden the money, and gone looking for the warmth without it.

That the experiment had failed did not make it foolish.