They had stolen it from children, using those children’s faces as a shield, converting the public’s genuine desire to help the vulnerable into a machine for enriching themselves.

There is a special ugliness in that, in weaponizing other people’s compassion, in making charity itself the instrument of theft, and it was the part of the whole affair I found hardest to forgive.

The restitution, when it came, did not go only to me.

The bulk of it, by court order and by my own insistence, was directed back toward the educational programs the foundation had always pretended to fund.

For the first time in twenty years, some real child, somewhere, would actually receive what the Vance name had so long only promised.