It was inconceivable. This college was her entire world. She grew up here, went to college here, got married here. She intended to spend the rest of her life on these forty acres of ivy-covered buildings and intellectual progress. For eight years she’d been the wife of the college’s leading researcher, and she taught the introductory botany classes. She hosted faculty parties and cheered up students who sometimes flagged under the weight of demanding academic rigor. This sort of work was what she was born to do, not haggle over money or tangle with the bank.

“President Matthews, please understand that I have no influence over how my uncle and grandfather parcel out the Blackstone fortune.”

The only reason her father could pressure the bank was because everyone in the family felt sorry for him. The last bit of sympathy from her family’s banking empire had died with him, and now the college was gasping for breath. Tuition revenue could never keep their research-intensive programs afloat.

“The only thing that will prove the college’s worth to my family is if we develop some magnificent scientific discovery that will garner national attention and help blot out the . . . well, the other things my family has been associated with in the past.”

It was an elegant way of alluding to child labor, unsafe business practices, and union busting. Such ugly words. But those were things of the past, and the Blackstone Bank had come a long way since the tragedy that nearly destroyed her father.

It hurt to see the anguish on President Matthews’s face. He was still young, but the sprinkling of gray in his hair had increased in the past two years. He’d inherited a financial mess from her father, and it would take a while to repair.

“You’re doing a wonderful job,” she assured him. “You have my complete, unstinting support. Tell me how I can help.”

He gave her a reluctant smile. “I know you dislike leaving campus and dealing with your uncle, but if you could appeal to him to reverse his decision, it would be a godsend.”

Appealing to Uncle Oscar meant confronting the two things she disliked most in the world: lawyers and the snarl of downtown Manhattan. There was a reason she rarely left the college campus. This secluded haven in the Upper West Side was free of the congestion, noise, and skyscrapers that clogged downtown. Gwen would happily go through the rest of her life ignoring financial ledgers or the tedium of legal haggling if she could.

But if a woman loved something, she needed to fight for it.

“You can count on me,” she told President Matthews.

His whooshing sigh of relief underscored how important it was that she succeed.