Six months later, the morning sun cast a golden light across the high-rise windows of the Sterling Tower executive suite, overlooking Central Park.

I sat at the primary mahogany desk, reviewing the third-quarter performance reports for Sterling Architectural and Asset Management, the entity through which I now oversaw my aunt’s holdings.

After six months of intensive auditing, my legal team had fully and cleanly separated my inheritance from Luca’s failed corporate ventures, securing my undisputed ownership of the house, the twenty-four-million-dollar liquid trust, and the skyscraper I was, that morning, sitting near the top of.

The fallout for Luca had been absolute, and it had been entirely lawful, and it had come, in the end, almost entirely from within his own affairs.