It happens the way water finds the low ground.
Gideon had suffered a real wound — a promise made and broken, a boy’s dream sold out from under him before he was old enough to understand why.
That wound was genuine, and if he had carried it honestly, it might have healed, or at least stopped festering.
Instead he had nursed it for twenty-seven years, turning it slowly from a grief into a grievance and from a grievance into a permission slip.
By the time the monthly transfers started arriving, the arithmetic was already done in his mind: the world owed him, his father owed him, his brother had more than his share — and so taking was not theft, it was correction.
That is the terrible machinery of resentment.