I had, and I had never had cause to be more grateful for a single sentence.

She had been right about him, as she had been right about almost everything, and she had not lived to see how right.

In her last weeks she had handed me the firm not as a gift but as an assignment — a responsibility to the people whose livelihoods ran through it — and I had spent the years since trying to be worthy of the handing.

She had not given me money.