My grandmother left me her mountain lodge—valued at $1,360,000. My father, who cut me off at eighteen, showed up to the will reading smiling. “We’ll turn this into a family business,” he said. “Together.” Then the attorney reached the final clause—and the entire room went silent.

Luxury is being welcomed exactly as you are.

If you make room for peace, people will find it.

By the time I finally slept—curled on top of the bedspread in the room Dorothy used when she was too tired to walk back to the house at the edge of the property—the office looked less like a crisis center and more like a command post.

Mark arrived on the third day.

He drove up from Denver in his dented Subaru with two duffel bags, a laptop, and a cardboard drink carrier full of coffees that had gone half cold by the time he walked through the door. Mark had been my friend since freshman year of college, when he found me crying in the stairwell outside the financial aid office because my father had canceled the card that paid for textbooks and I was trying to figure out which classes I could fake my way through without buying the books at all. He had sat down two steps below me, handed me a granola bar, and said, “You’re either going to tell me what happened or I’m going to guess, and I promise my guesses are wildly offensive.”

His guesses were, in fact, wildly offensive, which made me laugh hard enough to breathe.

He had been in my life ever since.