So when I had a daughter, and a home of my own, and no one in it whose approval I had to earn, I made one rule the foundation under all the others: that in this house, the people who love each other would also be kind to each other, every day, out loud, so that Lily would grow up with kindness as her baseline and not her aspiration.

I wanted contempt to be a foreign language to her.

I wanted her to reach adulthood so unfamiliar with being belittled by someone who claimed to love her that the first time anyone tried it, some deep alarm would go off, some part of her would say this is wrong, I have never lived like this, I will not start now. That was the real inheritance I was building, worth more than any school Mike could have paid for.

Not money.