“I didn’t come in first,” she said, laughing, gasping for breath against his shoulder.

“You finished the race,” he said. “That’s the only place that matters.”

Chapter 13 — Use What Remains

What remained after Sierra’s surgery was still, by any measure, a fortune, and Brandon kept hearing Roderick’s cracked voice in the hospital room: use what’s left to do some good — the kind that costs something.

He started with his own family, because he thought Roderick would have wanted that too. He sold the Bethesda estate — he could never have lived in it, knowing what had happened in its master bedroom — and one of the downtown condos, and with the proceeds he bought his mother a comfortable, modest house near the hospital, close enough that Sierra could keep her appointments easily, with a small garden his mother had wanted her whole life and never once had.

He kept the manufacturing plant in Detroit. He’d thought hard about selling it, and decided Roderick’s four hundred workers shouldn’t lose their livelihoods because their owner had been murdered.

Instead he restructured it: a real profit-sharing program, so that when the company did well the people who built the furniture did well too, and full health benefits for every worker and their families, no exceptions.