I laughed before I could stop myself.
“I can’t afford the restaurants you probably go to.”
The next evening, he showed up outside my apartment with Chinese takeout and a bottle of wine that probably cost more than everything in my closet.
We ate on my fire escape with our legs dangling over the city.
He told me he was tired of people who only saw his last name.
I told him I did not care about his last name.
I cared about whether he could solve a differential equation.
He could not.
I fell in love anyway.
For six months, we lived in a dream.
He took me to restaurants where the menus had no prices.
I showed him corner shops, subway musicians, late-night bakeries, and the kind of New York that did not appear in luxury magazines.
He said I made him feel real.
I said he made me feel seen.
When he proposed, it was not in front of cameras or under fireworks.
It was at sunrise in Central Park, on a quiet bench, with his grandmother’s simple gold band resting in his palm.
“I don’t want anyone else,” he whispered.
I believed him.
That was my first mistake.
The wedding was small by Sterling standards.
Only three hundred guests.
Only a reception that cost more than my parents’ house.
Only enough flowers to fill a hotel lobby.
Arthur Sterling did not smile once.
During the reception, he shook my hand and looked at me as if he were inspecting a crack in expensive porcelain.
“Welcome to the family, Nora,” he said. “I hope you understand what you have gotten yourself into.”
I thought he was being dramatic.
I thought rich people were just cold.
I thought love would soften them.
I was wrong.
The first dinner at the Sterling Estate happened three days after Julian and I returned from our honeymoon in Italy.
The mansion in Greenwich looked less like a home and more like a fortress built by people who feared being touched by ordinary life.
When I arrived downstairs, the formal dining room was already glowing with candlelight.
The table was set with china so delicate it looked unreal, silver polished like mirrors, and crystal glasses that caught the light like tiny prisons.