Twelve years of my father bragging about Cato’s money and calling Niko’s service “government paperwork.” It had taken less than six hours, in the end, for all of it to come down — not because I pushed it, but because they had built the whole thing out of greed, and greed is not a load-bearing material.

“What happens to the house?” Ivo asked, gentle.

I looked out the window, where the sun was coming through a break in the cloud, ordinary and bright.

“It stays in the Brightwood family,” I said.

“It’s where Niko wanted our daughter to grow up.

So that’s where she’ll grow up.”