I need to explain what that meant, because “losing the company” is an abstract phrase and what my father had actually done was not abstract at all.

If the Newton project defaulted — and a project that had already blown through its budget and was days from foreclosure was going to default — the creditors would seize my controlling shares to cover their losses.

Whoever ended up holding those shares would control Vireo.

They would control the exoskeleton designs, the manufacturing, the Emberton distribution deal, all of it.

And a creditor who seizes a company to recover a debt does not care about paralyzed nineteen-year-olds learning to walk; a creditor liquidates, sells to the highest bidder, strips it for parts.

My father, to buy himself a few more years of pretending to be rich, had wagered not just my nine years of work but the actual futures of every patient who was waiting for our technology to reach their hospital.