With Pride and a Sense of Ownership

A kiss in front of everyone, “the way someone signs a document” — and a tiny splinter: the lips responded a fraction of a second too late. Priscilla grew up in a house where her father “could tell by a single change of tone at dinner how many millions someone was trying to cheat him out of,” and she inherited that ear in full. She chose Jacob “the way her father chose assets,” and she loves him sincerely — “the way people love the best thing in their life: with pride and a sense of ownership, unable to separate one from the other.”

This is no caricature of a calculating bride. The author is precise: her feeling is real; it simply has no form other than ownership — the same grammar as Jacob’s and as Simon’s father’s, only in expensive packaging (see “A Picture for Other People’s Eyes”). Note the gesture with the splinter: not thrown away but set aside “in the place where she kept anything that might one day be useful.” That is how denial (see “Not About Another Girl”) turns into the gathering of evidence. Her arc in the coming chapters is about what happens when an asset stops obeying.