They could see only the price of a thing, and these had no price, and so to them they were nothing.

But of course they were not worthless.

They were priceless, in the exact and literal sense, beyond any price, and the proof of it was sitting in my mother’s trembling hands, and in the fact that a woman had risked her job to save them from a truck.

The men who threw them away had shown, in that one careless word, that they had never in their lives understood what anything was actually worth.

Chapter 25 — The Son Who Stayed