I was not going to save myself with the exact move that had damned my family.

So I let it all go through the front door, on the record, to the receivers and the government and the light.

I kept nothing I couldn’t account for.

I would rather rebuild from nothing clean than keep a fortune I’d have to launder my own conscience to hold.

I thought a great deal, in those weeks, about what the fortune had actually bought my family, because I wanted to be sure I understood the thing I was giving up before I gave it.

And what I concluded was this: it had bought us a beautiful house with a body under the foundation, and it had made every person who lived in that house a little more afraid every year, because the deeper the secret is buried the more it costs to keep it buried, and the cost is always paid in fear.