I had been raised carefully, by careful people; the largest sum I had ever been personally responsible for was the grocery budget of a household whose real finances my husband had always kept from me.

And now my child had put six million dollars into my hands and told me not to trust anyone.

The number was not a fortune to me in that moment.

It was a measurement — a way of gauging the size of the thing my son had gotten close to.

You do not get handed six million dollars by accident, and you do not get warned by a twelve-year-old to trust no one over something small.

The money was Linus telling me, in the only language large enough, exactly how much danger he was in: this much.