It is this: the chance, handed forward to the ones who come after, to live their lives without fear.

I did not understand that, at the start of all this.

When I first walked into that house, I thought of legacy, when I thought of it at all, the way most people do, as a matter of houses and accounts and names carved over doors, the things the wealthy leave behind.

Raymond had thought of it that way too, for most of his life, and it had nearly cost him everything, had surrounded him with people who valued him only for what he would one day leave them.

It was only at the very end, nearly murdered by the family he had tried to buy, and then handed back a son and a grandson he had never dared hope for, that he understood what he had gotten wrong.