My son froze my cards so I couldn’t even buy groceries. He thinks he controls our $42 million empire—but one call from the bank made me realize he has no idea what I’m about to do. First my credit card declined. Then my debit.

Tyler frowned. “Like when I took Ethan’s video game and Mom said I had to give it back?”

“In a way,” I said. “Except much bigger and much worse.”

Emma looked straight at me. “Did he steal from you?”

There it was. No child vocabulary. No escape.

“Yes,” I said. “He tried to.”

She nodded once, absorbing it not as gossip but as a reorganization of reality. Then she asked the question that told me she had already begun to separate herself morally from her parents.

“Are we going to lose the company?”

No child her age should have had to ask that. Yet there we were.

“No,” I said. “Your grandfather and I built it. I’m protecting it.”

She exhaled.

Years passed, as they do, without asking anyone whether enough had been settled to deserve them.