I think about what my life would have been if he had not.

That is the thought that still, occasionally, wakes me at night — not fear of the Draycotts, who are gone, but the vertigo of how close I came to having no folder at all.

Because without it, the story ends very differently, and the different ending is the one that happens to most women in my position, every day, with no dead uncle and no trust and no thirty-five percent.

Without it, I am the woman who is made comfortable.