Chloe took on a second job to service the credit card debts she had run up assuming, as she had assumed her whole life, that someone else would eventually cover them.

I did not do any of that to them.

This is the thing that took the whole family longest to understand, and some of them never did.

I did not reach into their lives and impoverish them out of revenge.

I stopped subsidizing them.

The lavish life they had all believed was theirs by right had never been theirs at all; it had been mine, extended to them, year after year, out of a generosity they took for their own wealth.