Marcus had treated the people beneath him as extensions of himself, as parts of his ego, as means to his ends.

The truest way to be his opposite, the truest repudiation of everything he was, was not to destroy what he had built, but to look carefully at it, to find the real and honest work buried under his fraud, and to save it.

He saw a piggy bank.

I saw eighty families.

That difference, in the end, was the whole difference between him and me, and saving those jobs was the truest victory of my life, far truer than anything that happened to Marcus, because it was a victory measured not in his suffering but in other people’s rescue.

Chapter 17 — Fireflies