She went the way she had wanted to go, and the way my father’s money had never once looked like it would let her — not in a beautiful room full of expensive strangers, but outdoors, by water she loved, held by the only two people whose presence she had ever actually asked for.

I had spent eight months and a fortune trying to give my mother everything.

In the end, the thing she wanted had cost nothing at all, and I had very nearly been too much the man my father made me to give it to her.

I think about that often, how narrow the margin was.

A few more years of being who I had become, a slightly harder heart, a slightly louder cold voice, and I would have blown out that lamp a different way — burned the trust, buried the ledgers, sent Juliet back to her uniform, and stood at my mother’s expensive bedside at the end still believing I had done right by her with my money.

That I did not is the single piece of luck I am most grateful for in a life that has had, I will admit, more than its share of the harder kind.