Chapter 19 — Worth

I thought a great deal, in the days that followed, about my father’s one equation — that a man’s worth is his net worth, that what you are is what you have — because that night took it apart in front of me so completely that I have never been able to put it back together, and I would not want to.

Consider what my father’s arithmetic had gotten wrong, at every single term.

By his measure, Lucas was worthless — a public defender with a government salary and no assets to speak of.

And Lucas turned out to be the richest man in that chapel, if you measure a man by the number of people who would stand in front of danger for him, because thirty of them had come in uniform to do exactly that.

By my father’s measure, my mother was a soft, dependent, unimpressive woman who had never earned a dollar of her own.