Their collapse was not my doing.

It was simply what had been true all along, revealed the moment I stopped hiding it from them with my money.

This distinction, between causing a collapse and merely revealing one, mattered enormously to me, and it is the answer I give to the only accusation the family ever managed to level at me that briefly stung: that I had destroyed them, that a jealous, vengeful woman had ruined a family over a dinner.

Because it would be easy, from the outside, to see it that way.