I know exactly what it costs.”

I want to say more about that decision, because it was the truest expression of everything I had learned.

Mr.

Sterling assumed, as most people do, that the point of money is to escape, to rise, to remove yourself from the conditions of the poor and install yourself among the comfortable, the estate in Europe, the travel, the mansion.

And for most of my life, I would have understood the fortune the same way, as a door out of the cold room, a ticket to the far side of the class divide that had defined my whole existence.

But I had spent a week, now, being wealthy, and I had discovered that escape held no appeal for me at all, and I understood why.