She'd always thought, as had everyone else, he was just a dirt-poor farm boy from Savannah, whose ma set about bettering herself in a whore house. Because that was as much as he let them think.

"You never said "

With difficulty he bared his teeth. It wasn't that he was ashamed. It wasn't that nothing he'd done had ever been enough to outrun the humbleness of his birth and his childhood. It wasn't even that he'd somehow parted with this miserable fact. It was that her ...