“I only ever wanted him to stop using me,” I said.

“I never needed to watch him ruined.”

My uncle smiled, a little sadly.

“Good,” he said.

“Then you still know the difference between justice and revenge.

Most people who get their hands on this much power forget it inside a year.”

Six years later, I brought Micah to his first day of elementary school, and Ivan met us at the courtyard, and we stood together in the morning sun — not as husband and wife, but as two people who had finally, expensively, learned how to raise the same child without trying to own him.

The firm had started as a single desk and a phone in a rented room, because I’d needed, after everything, to build one thing that was mine down to the studs — not inherited, not married into, not handed to me by a trust that unlocked on the right day.