My father, Gregory Hayes, had died four years earlier.

He had been a quiet, careful man, and right around the time I married Gavin, he had taken his life’s savings and invested them in a technology firm called Apex Vanguard, and before he died he had transferred all of those shares into my name.

He had tried to talk to me about them, more than once.

And I — newly married, newly convinced by Gavin that money was his department, that I needn’t trouble myself with such things — had waved him off, had filed the folder away, had ignored my own father’s careful gift for three years because my husband had taught me not to think about money as though it were mine to think about.

I sat on the floor of that storage room, my father four years gone, and opened the folder at last, and I heard his voice in my head, patient and a little sad: Nora, pay attention.