To him a hundred eighteen million dollars would have been a number to say at a party, a thing to wear.

To me it was distribution — it was our exoskeletons in every major hospital in the country instead of the handful we could reach on our own, which meant thousands of people who had been told they would never walk again taking their first steps, not someday, but this year.

I had held a lot of hands in nine years.

I had stood in that garage-turned-workshop watching a nineteen-year-old who had been paralyzed in a car accident stand up on our first working frame, his mother sobbing against the wall, and I had understood in that moment exactly what I had been put on the earth to do, and it had nothing to do with a coat or a brownstone or which fork went with which plate.

My parents had spent forty years building the appearance of a legacy.

I had spent nine years building a thing that made people walk.