It did not.

What he discovered instead was that keeping money through deception had been quietly costing him something he had never put a name to, some low background pressure he had mistaken for the ordinary weight of being alive — and that letting the money go, in order to stop the deception, felt less like losing a limb and more like setting down a bag so heavy he had forgotten he was carrying it.

Losing money, it turned out, was far less terrifying than keeping it the way his family had kept it.

He had been afraid of the wrong thing his entire life.