I used his own company to give people room.

That is the ending I chose.

It is the only one that felt like winning.

And I have come to believe that this is the truest form of victory over a person like my father, far truer than merely taking his money or his position, because it defeats not just the man but the entire logic he lived by.

My father’s whole philosophy — the philosophy that produced the cruelty and the comparisons and the fountain — rested on a single premise, so deep in him he probably never examined it: the belief that worth is a finite, zero-sum thing, that there is only so much of it in the world, and that the way to have more of it yourself is to take it from others.

That is why he shrank me.