She handed it straight back to me across the table.

“Do not try to turn your guilt into a transaction, Alexander,” she said.

“I am not a debt you can pay down until the number reaches zero and you get to feel clean.

It doesn’t work that way.

It is never going to work that way.”

So I did the only thing she would permit me to do, which was to cover every dollar of my father’s ongoing care — his housing, his medicine, his endless hours of therapy — quietly, completely, and without ever again calling it generosity.

Lucy went back to the laundry for a few months, and then she and a friend opened a small independent shop of their own, dry cleaning and tailoring, in a storefront on a modest street.