He stared at me with a kind of stunned incomprehension usually reserved for lottery winners and men who discover the woman they underestimated has been reading the contract all along.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
That, at least, was true.
I folded my hands on the desk. “You knew I worked in finance.”
“In finance is not this.”
“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”
He dragged a hand through his hair, upsetting the careful neatness of it. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
Because I wanted to know whether you could love a woman without first calculating her market value. Because men are kinder to wealthy women but not always better. Because the world had spent decades making me feel like an orphan and a girl and a self-made woman were identities that required either explanation or apology, and I was tired of offering both. Because privacy is the only luxury some people can still afford.
But I said, “Because what I have is not the most important thing about me.”
He actually laughed once, short and disbelieving. “It’s a little important.”
“Only now?”
He winced.