He ran a real company, closed real deals, read people well enough to charm a room full of governors.

And yet he had constructed, and lived inside, a version of events in which a woman who had grown up over a print shop had been elevated entirely by his genius — when the print shop was my grandmother’s first building, when his genius had been funded at every step by my trusts, when the very credit line that kept his flagship project alive traced back through three holdings to me.

He believed the opposite of the truth so thoroughly that he could stand in a kitchen and tell me everything I had came from him, while wearing a watch I’d bought him, in a house I owned, built on money I’d earned.

People believe what flatters them, I have learned, with a force that no fact can overcome.

Ferdinand needed to be the source of everything, needed me to be the rescued girl, because that story made him large.

And I had let him keep it, year after year, correcting nothing, because I thought that was what love asked of me — to make myself the smaller figure so that he could feel like the larger one.