Every person alive wants to be loved for themselves and not for what they can provide.

Isadora had simply been in the rare and terrible position of being able to actually run the test — and of having to live, for eight years, inside the answer.

Chapter 8 — Holding Them All Above the Water

Because after the wedding, the thing Lucius had once loved about her slowly became the thing he used against her.

The plain clothes, the modest car, the quiet manner he had called refreshing became, month by month, evidence in his mind that she was beneath him — that she should be grateful, that she had married up, that whatever grace the Beckworths extended to her was a kindness she owed them for.

And the cruel joke at the center of it, the one none of them could see, was that Isadora had been holding the entire family above the water the whole time.