He warned me.
When I wouldn’t listen, he did the only thing left to him: he suspended my access to the family accounts, hoping the cold water would wake me.
It didn’t.
I married Declan as a woman who seemed to have nothing, exactly as I’d wanted.
I need you to understand why a sane woman would do such a thing, because from the outside it looks like foolishness, and it wasn’t.
It was a wound.
I had grown up as Aldous Crawford’s daughter, which meant I had spent my whole life unable to tell the difference between people who wanted me and people who wanted proximity to him.
Every friendship carried an asterisk.
Every man who courted me might have been courting a merger.
By the time I was thirty I had become a connoisseur of the specific brightness that comes into a person’s eyes when they learn your last name — and I was so tired, so bone-tired, of being a door other people were trying to walk through to get to something else.