Flynn had spent years borrowing and building and expanding, never once knowing that the ground beneath his company belonged to the dead old man he’d dismissed at his own wedding.

I want to tell you about my grandfather, because he deserves to be more than a plot device in the story of his own foresight.

Cornelius Ashcombe grew up with nothing and spent sixty years learning, the hard way and then the profitable way, how money actually moves — who really owns a thing, versus whose name is on the door.

He was courtly and soft-spoken and he wore the same three suits for thirty years, and people who met him at a party always underestimated him, which he found useful and never once corrected.