The Weight of Gold
“I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I don’t think she’s a bad person. But I felt, by the end, like a piece she’d collected.”
Eleanor thought about this. She thought about Preston, the man she’d been engaged to first — the jaw, the shipping lanes, the interior life of a parking garage. She thought about the French count. She thought about the long line of people who had wanted to be near her wealth or her name or her access, who had wanted her as context, as setting, as the background against which their own life would read better.
“I know something about that,” she said quietly.
He looked at her. “I know you do,” he said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”