“Thank you.” She would have bitten through the guardrail, her jaw was clenched so tight. I needed to make a gesture.

There was a gas station after a few minutes, and I stopped beside some landscaping and pulled up two flowers.

“Here.”

She relented. “I accept your apology.” We got back out on the road and she held them, treating them with far more respect than they deserved. “Why did I marry you, anyway?”

“For my money,” I said.

“Then I made a big mistake.” She said it with a smile, though, for which I was very grateful. “I don’t know if your money is worth putting up with you. If you worked with those people-Nathan Kern and all the rest of them-you could be rich.”

“I am rich.”

“Not as rich as you could be.” The edges of the smile hardened a little. “He’d put you on the board of the foundation, and you could get control of everything your father had.” She looked out the window. “It should have been yours anyway.”

“Look, all I did was get born into this family,” I said. “It wasn’t my choice. As long as they send my check each month, nobody gets hurt. If they want anything else I’ll inflict damage.” I waited until she looked back at me. The two daisies in her hand were a little damaged. “You like your flowers?”

“Yes.”

The road was bending through hills, away from the ocean. I stopped again, just off the edge, where the guardrail actually was bitten through. Out of the car, I stood and looked down the hillside at the scraped dirt and torn bushes and the broken tree at the bottom. They’d cleaned away the wreckage, every piece of it.

Katie got out with me.

“Why am I here?” I said. “What is the point?”

She pulled a knot of wildflowers from the ground, much nicer than the daisies, and handed it to me.

“Here.”

“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” I said.