That is what money is actually for, I understood that morning, and it is the thing my sister never grasped and my father tried to warn us both about in a letter she hid: not a trophy, not a scoreboard, not a measure of a person’s worth, but a tool, and like any tool, worth exactly nothing except for the good it lets you do with it.

I used mine to carry my daughter out of a pigpen.

It has never, before or since, been worth more to me than it was in that single moment.

Chapter 11 — The Debt

Gabriel opened the third binder, and it told the story of how my sister had come to this.

Over three years, Veronica had leveraged her fifty percent of the estate to fund a failing event-planning business, two European vacations, a major kitchen remodel.

She owed eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars to a private lender, and she was five months delinquent.