My stepmother called at 11:47 p.m. on the first night in the beach house I bought with my own money and told me she and my father were moving in the next day, that they were taking the master suite, that her daughter would get the best ocean-view room

That mattered to me more than the price tag, though the number had certainly stunned people when the sale closed. Five point six million dollars. In La Jolla, with that view, it was not even outrageous by local standards, but I was still the daughter of a woman who clipped grocery coupons with a pair of kitchen scissors and kept a careful envelope system for holidays and school clothes. I understood money not as spectacle but as stored hours, stored discipline, stored choices. My mother had taught me that long before she taught me anything about beauty or manners or grief. She used to say, when I was little and wanted things we couldn’t afford, “Money is freedom wearing practical shoes.” At the time, I thought she was being funny. By the time I was thirty-four, I understood she had been giving me survival language.