I read them as one mother reading another mother’s worst nightmare, and reaching across it to say, this one I can take from you; this one is handled; your boy is going to run in the sun.

There is no training for that.

You can only have it if you have lived it, and I had lived it, and Arthur, who missed very little, had seen that the very thing that had made me poor had also made me the right person to give his fortune away.

Chapter 24 — Four Hundred Children

Two years after Arthur’s passing, I sat one evening on a simple marble bench in the garden of the coastal estate, watching the sun go down over the cliffs and the sky turn to gold and amber and violet over the sea.

The bench was carved with a single line, the words Arthur had said to me on the porch, which I had chosen for him: Love is not something you buy or inherit.