Because the truth was almost offensively simple: I was not poor. I had never been poor. My late mother had been the only child of a logistics magnate whose empire stretched from shipping corridors to freight terminals across three continents. When she died, everything passed to me through a trust designed by people far more ruthless and more intelligent than Randolph. By the time I turned thirty-three, the family holdings under that structure were worth well over two billion dollars.
My father, Frederick, controlled the broader private equity firm that managed much of it. He could have filled magazines with his face if he wanted. He could have hosted fundraisers and collected awards and played the same social game Randolph worshipped. But after my mother died, he wanted no part of high society. He bought land, retreated from spectacle, rebuilt vintage engines with his own hands, and ran one of the most feared investment firms on Wall Street from behind a veil so thick most people only knew his name, not his habits.
He used to say there were two kinds of rich men: those who wanted to be seen and those who wanted to own the building people mistook for the horizon.
Randolph belonged to the first kind. Frederick belonged to the second.
And I, in one of the more foolish acts of my life, had wanted to know whether a man could love me without the gravity of my money bending every choice around us. So I told Prescott a partial truth instead of the whole one. I let him believe I carried student debt. I let him believe my father was a mechanic because, technically, he often was. I let him see me as ordinary because I wanted to know if love could exist without calculation.
The answer had been clear much earlier than I wanted to admit.
At first Prescott was merely condescending. He corrected the way I ordered wine. He laughed at the used sedan I drove. He told stories at parties about how refreshing it was to be with someone uncomplicated, as if I were a hobby horse he had rescued from a pawn shop. Once, when I suggested he apologize to a building superintendent he had publicly humiliated over a delayed inspection, he stared at me with naked contempt and said, “You always take the side of staff. It’s like class loyalty is genetic with you.”