“You let me talk down to you,” she said slowly, “for ten years — knowing you owned half this town?” And I gave her the only answer that was true.

“I didn’t come back to compare bank accounts, Veronica.

I have never once cared what you thought of my duffel bag or my boots.

I came back for my daughter.

The land only matters now because it’s the thing that lets me carry her out.”

I have thought about the strangeness of my own relationship to that wealth, because it is not the usual story, and I think the difference matters.

In most stories of a person who secretly owns a fortune, the fortune is the point, the hidden power, the ace up the sleeve whose revelation delivers the satisfying triumph.