I had been sitting on the edge of my bed for most of the afternoon, still in my school clothes, watching light move across the ceiling while the examination results sat open on my laptop. The number was 98.7. I had read it so many times the digits had stopped feeling real, but the feeling behind them was very real: a low, solid satisfaction, the kind that arrives when years of private effort have finally produced something visible. My mother had died when I was fourteen, which meant she had not been there for four years of AP courses, four years of study schedules held together with index cards and discipline and the particular stubbornness of a girl who understood that education was the one thing no one could take back from her once she had it.

Arthur Reed was a man who understood control the way other men understand weather: not as something to be managed but as the natural state of things, the atmosphere through which everyone else moved on his terms. He had remarried when I was fifteen, a woman named Celia who wore jewelry that caught the light in every room and had a way of entering conversations that left you slightly less certain of yourself than you had been before she arrived. She was not overtly cruel in the beginning. She was something subtler and more difficult to name, the kind of person who says the right things in the right rooms and says the real things later, quietly, to the right ears. Together they had a daughter, Lily, two years younger than me and treated since birth as the corrected version of everything I had failed to be by simply existing before their relationship did.