“We do this my way,” I told the room, before anyone could speak.

“We do it clean, we do it legal, and we do it so completely that it can never be undone.

Anyone who can’t sign up for that, I love you, and there’s the door.” No one moved toward the door.

I want to say something about those men, and about what it means that they came at all, because in a story full of powerful families and their corrupt reach, it is easy to lose sight of the quieter kind of power that answered them — the kind that has nothing to do with money.

I had not spoken to any of these men in nineteen years.