Chapter 23 — The Foundation

Everything changed, in the months that followed, with the completeness of a page turning.

The trust was fully settled under Arthur’s careful legal guidance.

Chloe’s college tuition was paid in full, every cent of it, the loans that had loomed over her future simply gone, lifted off her the way a fever breaks.

I had watched those loans accumulate over her first years of school with a helpless dread, each semester adding to a total that I knew would follow her for a decade or more into her adult life, a shadow on a future that had not even begun yet.

And now they were gone, erased in a single afternoon of Arthur’s careful paperwork, and Chloe would step out into her life unburdened, free to choose her path on its own merits instead of on the basis of which job could service her debt.