The foundation's new director was a woman named Sylvia Ortiz. She had spent twenty years in nonprofit management, and she had no connection to the Vaughn family. Eleanor had nominated her. I had voted for her. She was competent, careful, and she did not like Charles.
Sylvia called me into her office on her third day.
"I've been reviewing the files," she said. "You did a lot of work here. The manual, the audit, the grant program. You should have been the director."
"I didn't want to be," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because I wanted to go home," I said. "I wanted to have a life that was not about him."
Sylvia looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded. "Fair enough. What do you want to do now?"
"I want to run the grant program," I said. "The literacy initiative. It's mine. I built it. I
