And yet it landed on Christopher’s life like the end of the world, because he had spent seven years mistaking my permission for his possession.

That is the entire crux of it.

He experienced the withdrawal of my generosity as a theft, because he had come to believe my generosity was his property.

But you cannot steal from someone what was never theirs.

I did not take his wealth.

I stopped giving him mine.

The distinction was invisible to him, and to Beatrice, and it is invisible to anyone who has come to believe that a generous person’s continued generosity is owed to them — but it is the whole distinction between a victim and a person who has simply, at last, closed her own open hand.

I withdrew my hand from beneath the weight.