Adele rubbed slow circles on Finn’s back.

“I stopped protecting you.”

She let the sentence sit, because it was true in a way her mother had never had to reckon with.

For years, Adele had been the family’s quiet insulation — the one who saw the inflated invoices and said nothing, who noticed the ghost vendors and the absurd expense accounts and the executive bonuses signed off in the same breath as the factory-floor layoffs, and who swallowed all of it.

Her father called it smart business.

Her brother called her too sentimental to understand how the world worked.