But I want to be honest that the land had never once, in ten years, felt like power to me.

My father left it to me, and I reinvested its dividends into the town, and I almost never thought about it, because I had spent my adult life in a world where the things that kept you alive were not deeds and portfolios but your training, your discipline, and the people beside you.

Money, to me, was abstract, numbers Gabriel managed in an office I rarely visited.

And when I walked through those iron gates that morning and my sister sneered at my empty duffel bag, I felt no secret satisfaction, no delicious anticipation of the reveal to come, because the wealth was simply not real to me in the way it was real to her.