"She expects you to."
"People who use status as a weapon usually assume everyone else wants one."
Richard absorbed that.
"She's ashamed."
"Good. Shame can be useful if it becomes responsibility instead of self-pity."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then Chloe will learn to build boundaries."
Richard nodded slowly.
Harold reached for his glasses again.
"Anything else?"
Richard hesitated.
"One thing. Why didn't you just tell us?"
Harold smiled.
"Martha asked the same question."
"And?"
"Because when you show people your money too early, you stop learning who they are."
Richard sat with that answer.
Harold picked up the proposal again.
"Now, your section on preventive maintenance is strong, but page forty-two has a labor assumption I don't believe."
Richard blinked. "We're going back to the contract?"
"You came here for a meeting."
Richard opened his briefcase.
"Right."
Harold did not turn the page immediately.
Instead, he closed the binder and rested both palms on it.
"Richard, before we go any farther, I need to know whether you actually understand what happened Saturday, or whether you only understand that it happened in front of the wrong man."
Richard's expression tightened.
"I understand the difference."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
Harold waited.
Richard looked toward the conference room window. The river moved beyond the old warehouse glass, gray beneath a winter sky.
"Diane wasn't always like that," he said finally.
Harold said nothing.
"That sounds like an excuse."
"It does."
"I'm not offering one. I'm trying to explain something I should have understood a long time ago."
Richard folded his hands on the table.
Diane had grown up in a house where money disappeared suddenly.
Her father had owned a small printing business. For most of her childhood, the family lived comfortably. Nice school. Club membership.
Summer vacations. Then a supplier lawsuit and a bad expansion loan collided in the same year. By the time Diane was sixteen, the business was gone. The house followed. Her mother sold jewelry quietly and told friends they were "downsizing by choice."
They moved into a rental across town but continued driving back to their old neighborhood for church because Diane's mother could not bear the idea of people knowing.
"She learned that humiliation was not being poor," Richard said. "Humiliation was being seen becoming poor."
Harold's face remained unreadable.
Richard continued.
Diane had watched former friends stop calling. She had overheard one mother say that inviting Diane to a ski trip might be awkward because "her family couldn't keep up anymore." She had watched her own mother iron the same expensive blouse before every social event because it was the last one that still looked like their old life.
Diane went to college on scholarships and loans.
She became obsessed with never being vulnerable to other people's judgment again.
"When we met," Richard said, "I thought it was ambition. Maybe part of it was. She could walk into a room and understand the hierarchy in five minutes. She knew who mattered, who wanted to matter, and who everyone was pretending not to notice."