My grandfather had died afraid.

My father had spent thirty years afraid, believing his own father a murderer, jumping at the sound of his own name.

And I had nearly been drugged into a permanent fog to protect the same secret from finally seeing daylight.

The money had never made any of us safe.

It had only ever made us hostages to the thing it was built on.

So when I signed the last of it over — the clean parts and the dirty parts together, the whole rotten inheritance — I did not feel like I was losing a fortune.