Those things are not for sale, in either direction; they can only be earned, slowly, by the accumulated weight of times you held a line for someone when it cost you and gained you nothing.

Lucas had spent his whole adult life making exactly those deposits, in a currency my father did not even know existed, and on our wedding day the account came due all at once, in a chapel, in dress blues, in tears.

My father thought he was the rich man in that room.

He was, by an immeasurable margin, the poorest person present, and the man he called a nobody was so wealthy that the wealth walked in through the doors on thirty pairs of feet and drew steel over my head.

“I kept it from you,” Lucas said, “and I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry.

I told myself I was protecting you.