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“Of course you do. You’ve spent your entire life benefiting from understanding exactly how these things work.”

The heat rose into my face. “That’s different.”

“Is it? How?”

I opened my mouth and found I didn’t have an answer.

He watched me for a moment, then leaned back. “You knew this match was good for both families.”

There was the sentence I wanted to reject, but the problem was, I couldn’t, because I had known.

When Lorrie and I first started seeing each other seriously, I’d known my parents approved before either of them said a word. The Hales were established, wealthy, respectable. Lorrie was beautiful, educated, and had grown up with the same rules I had. There wouldn’t be arguments over religion or money or which family got Christmas morning while the other got Christmas Eve. Our parents knew one another. Our expectations matched. There was no great cultural divide to overcome, no practical reason anyone could point to and say this would be difficult.

My mother liked her. Walter liked me, and my father liked everything else. And in the beginning, I’d liked that too.

I hadn’t sat across from her at dinner and calculated what she was worth, and I certainly hadn’t kissed her while thinking about trusts or collateral or whether her money might someday rescue my father’s brokerage, but I’d thought she was suitable and would make a good wife.

It made me feel ashamed now, although at the time it had seemed almost complimentary.

My father looked at me as though he could see the argument happening in my head.

“You didn’t object when Walter started talking about moving to Cleveland,” he said.

“That had nothing to do with her money.”

“It had everything to do with the families being aligned.”

“I thought Cleveland was about me learning the business.”

“It is.”

“You just told me Lorrie’s trust can save the business.”

“I said it can give us breathing room.”

For the first time all evening, my father looked tired enough that the confidence slipped.

“Nothing happens without consent.”

“Whose?”

He hesitated and that was all I needed to hear.

“Lorrie’s?”

He nodded and under other circumstances, I might have laughed.

Instead I picked up the legal pad again, looked at the figures I now understood meant more than bad investments, and set it down carefully.

“How long have you been counting on this?”

He exhaled through his nose.

“Since Walter mentioned the trust structure last spring.”

Last spring.

Around the same time Lorrie and I had started seeing each other regularly.