The flaw in stealth wealth is not the stealth itself.

It is that stealth requires trust to be safe — that hiding your strength only works among people who would never exploit its concealment, and becomes a fatal liability the moment you are hiding it from someone who would.

My modesty was a gift I was giving to the world, an assurance that I would never lord my success over anyone, never make another person feel small by my wealth.

But a gift can only be safely given to someone who will receive it as a gift, and Christopher and his family received my modesty not as generosity but as evidence — evidence that I was, in fact, the small and luckless woman I was too gracious to insist I was not.