It had been paying — paying a debt I did not owe, meeting an obligation that had been manufactured for me, satisfying an expectation I had never agreed to.

When Beatrice praised her son and I covered his losses, I was not being generous.

I was being milked, and calling it love to make the milking bearable.

And the thing that had curdled inside me over those years, the thing I could not name until it was over, was not the loss of money.

It was the loss of choice.

Generosity that you cannot withhold is not generosity; it is tribute.