Just a fair chance.

That was all my father’s trust had ever actually bought Quinn: not success, which she had to earn herself in libraries at two in the morning, but the simple, enormous freedom of a starting line she could reach without crawling.

I thought sometimes about the difference between the two granddaughters, and how completely it had inverted.

Presley had been handed everything and taught nothing, and the everything had evaporated the moment its source dried up, leaving her with community-college loans and a chip on her shoulder.

Quinn had been handed a fair chance and her father’s stubbornness and a dead great-grandfather’s foresight, and she had built, out of those unglamorous materials, an actual life — a degree that was hers, a skill no one could repossess, a future that sat in her own name and could not be wired away by anyone’s forged signature.

The family had spent decades betting on the wrong girl.