I lost Raymond.

I lost the mother I had spent thirty-six years imagining I had.

I lost the brother and sister I grew up beside.

But I gained one thing that no fortune on earth could have bought me, and I have held on to it ever since: the plain, hard, freeing truth that blood can make two people related, but only loyalty, and care, and the love you show when there is nothing at all to be gained from showing it, can ever make them family.

Raymond taught me that, in a cold house, with a glass of water and a bowl of terrible peaches, at the very end of his life.

It is the most valuable thing anyone ever gave me, and it did not cost a single dollar of the fifty-eight million.