He tried, in the quiet of those weeks, to understand how the fear had gotten so badly miscalibrated, because it had governed nearly every decision he had ever made without his ever examining it.

He had been raised, as people of his kind are raised, to treat the preservation of the family fortune as the highest imaginable duty and its loss as the ultimate catastrophe — a fate worse, in the unspoken hierarchy of his childhood, than almost any moral failure.

You did not lose the money.

Whatever else happened, whatever it cost, whatever had to be buried or settled or silenced, the money was kept.

That was the one commandment beneath all the others, and it was so deep in him that he had never once thought to question whether it was true.