I had lent him money for rent, for traffic fines, for credit-card debt, once for repairs on a luxury SUV that had nearly been repossessed.

And still he treated me like hired help who’d gotten lucky in a tech boom.

That was the strangest part of my position in that family, and it took me years to name it: the more I gave them, the less they respected me.

I used to think respect was something you earned through reliability, that if I proved useful enough, dependable enough, they’d come around.

It works exactly backward with people like the Hargraves.

To them, a man who keeps handing over money is not admirable; he is a resource, and you do not respect a resource, you manage it.