The building that had been the monument to her smallness became, instead, the proof that she had never been small at all.

The women who came through its doors were not, most of them, rich, and their stories bore little surface resemblance to hers.

But underneath, Isadora recognized every one of them, because the mechanism was always the same: a person made to believe, slowly and by someone who claimed to love them, that they were worth only what they could provide, and nothing on their own.

She had employed the finest lawyers in the country to prove that a man had stolen her money.

What she built in that house was for the far larger number of women who could never prove anything, who had only the quiet certainty that they had been made to disappear inside their own lives.

She wanted them to walk in the front door, past the plaque, and read four words, and begin — slowly, the way she had — to believe them again.