I had seen, in my mother’s firm, what ownership does to the way a person works.

A person who shares in what they build treats it differently than a person who merely rents their hours to it, not out of virtue but out of simple arithmetic — because now the care is on their own behalf.

Damian’s Cardinal had been a machine for extracting the labor of eight hundred people and converting it into the appearance of his success.

I wanted it to be, instead, a thing those eight hundred people partly owned, so that the growth, when it came, came home to them.