“I know,” Ford acknowledged. He was all too familiar with feeling responsible for bad things happening. Verity’s hasty marriage under suspect circumstances, Grace’s continued social failures and her eventual exit from the marriage mart. Everything that had happened with Jemima — who still did not know exactly how dire her circumstances were, because he was still trying to shield her from it, but he knew every day and felt guilty every day. The difference was that all of that was his fault, or at least partially his fault. Adrienne being sick was — not Cash’s fault, really. Sometimes people got sick. Sometimes they never got better. Sometimes pregnancies didn’t end right. That could happen to anyone, no matter how much money they had or how healthy they were or how much their husband loved them (or didn’t).

But he understood the impulse, because Ford was also responsible for so many things that went wrong in the lives of everyone around him, and when you did things that hurt people this routinely it was sometimes hard to separate out the things you owned from the things you didn’t. “I know it feels that way,” he continued. “That’s why I’m telling you it’s not.”

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