Those hidden accounts were the difference between raising Otis on a knife’s edge and raising him with room to breathe — the difference between a childhood spent watching me do anxious arithmetic at the kitchen table and a childhood where he did not have to.

Kingston had concealed that money precisely so that his son would go without while he financed his reinvention, and getting it back was not greed; it was simply my child’s due, finally paid.

So when the restitution came through, I did not feel guilty about my relief.

I felt like a mother whose son would now have the things his father had tried to hide from him.

But the collapse of Kingston himself — the resignation, the debt, the ruin of the polished man — that I felt more complicated things about.

I won’t pretend I felt nothing watching it.