She was not a fool.

She was a good person, in the hands of people who knew precisely how to turn her goodness into a weapon.

And the day I understood that, I stopped being ashamed of her, and started, simply, being free of them.

Chapter 3 — Permission to Save Yourself

The thing that finally cracked the ten years open was money, as it so often is — specifically, my grandmother’s money.

My grandmother had died three months earlier, and she had left me an investment portfolio worth three point eight million dollars, the fruit of an entire lifetime of careful, patient, unglamorous saving.