From the outside I had recovered beautifully.
I came back from Paris, and I put myself back together, and I took over the company when my father’s heart gave out, and I ran it well — better than well.
The board loved me.
The press called me disciplined, focused, a serious man for serious times.
And underneath all of it I was a house with the lights on and no one living inside.
I had decided, in that Paris hotel, that the part of me capable of loving someone had proven to be a liability — that it had made me a fool, had let a woman gut me and walk away laughing, and that the sensible thing, the safe thing, was to never let it operate again.
So I didn’t.
I built a life with no soft surfaces in it.
The arrangement with the Wexleys was the logical end of that architecture: a marriage engineered to contain no risk of love, because love, I had learned, was just the thing that let people take everything from you.
My mother had not only stolen Yelena and the boys from me.
She had, with the same lie, quietly convinced me to wall off my own heart and call the walling-off maturity.
Six years of it.
Six years of a numbness I mistook for strength, all of it built on a story that was false in every particular.
Chapter 13 — The Wall Cracks