An empire I had bled and lied and abandoned my own children to build, dissolving in real time, and me standing on a New Jersey sidewalk telling the man whose job was to save it to let it go.

But here is the truth of it: I had just spent an hour in a small bright apartment that smelled of chamomile, in the presence of two boys who wanted nothing I had, and a woman who had built a life worth ten of mine out of the exact materials I had thrown away as worthless.

And standing there afterward, with my phone buzzing about the collapse of everything I owned, I understood that the empire had never actually been an asset.

It had been the bill.