I want to be clear about that, to myself as much as to her.

I was not casting Bristol into poverty out of spite; I was simply, at long last, declining to fund a fantasy.

For three years I had paid for a life she had not earned and did not value, and had called it generosity, when it was really only enablement — the steady financing of a young woman’s belief that the world owed her a yacht.

The kindest thing, and the hardest, was to stop.

She would have to work now.

She would have to learn what everyone learns who is not permitted to skip the lesson: that the life she had been performing online belonged to people who had built something, and that she had built nothing, because she had never once had to.