For the first time in his adult life, Aurelio’s money was not a key.

It was just paper.

He sat with that, alone, in the small hours, and something in him that had been rigid for seventy years began, painfully, to bend.

He had built his whole identity on being the man who could fix anything, provide anything, control any outcome — and he understood now that this identity had been, in part, another form of the same pride that had cost him his son.

A man who believes his money can solve everything never has to learn to simply be present with someone in their suffering, because he is always busy fixing.