She had given her the job of protecting it from the people who shared its name.

That distinction mattered to Adele more than she could easily explain to anyone who hadn’t grown up the way she had.

In her family, everything had always been about ownership — what you held, what you controlled, what carried your name on the deed.

Her father’s entire identity was a function of the things he possessed.

And her grandmother, at the end of a lifetime spent inside that hunger, had tried to teach Adele the opposite lesson: that the deepest relationship you can have to something valuable is not ownership but stewardship — not this is mine but this is mine to protect. The twelve percent had never made Adele rich; it was a minority stake in a mid-sized packaging company, not a fortune.

What it made her was responsible.