The cruel find their cruelty better funded.

And now here was a million more, and for one vertiginous second I saw two futures fork in front of me.

In one, I let the million become the same kind of thing the hundred thousand had been — a prize to fight over, a poison to hand around a table.

In the other, I used it, coldly and precisely, as a tool: not to reward anyone, not even to punish anyone, but to buy back the one thing that actually mattered, which was my wife’s life and her safety and a future with her in it.

The money was never going to make me happy.