My uncle Richard used to say that wealth was not a reward. It was a test, and most people failed it before they ever received it. He said this in the particular dry, unhurried way he said most things, as though the observation were so obvious it barely warranted the effort of speaking it aloud, and I had listened and stored it alongside the other things he said that I did not fully understand at the time and came to understand completely later. He was that kind of man. The kind whose meaning arrived in stages.

My name is Abigail Mercer. I was twenty-nine years old when Richard Halston died of a stroke in his home outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a Wednesday morning in March. He was sixty-one, apparently in reasonable health, and had given no one any particular reason to expect that the Wednesday in question would be different from any other. He had built a private logistics company from a single contracted warehouse in the mid-nineties, expanded it through a combination of early investment and the kind of operational discipline that larger firms found difficult to replicate, and had quietly diversified into commercial real estate and financial holdings over the two decades that followed. He had no wife. He had no children. He had a tightly controlled circle of people he trusted, a larger circle of people he respected at a distance, and a very clear-eyed understanding of where the rest of humanity fell on the spectrum between those two categories.

To most people who knew of him, Richard was formidable. To the people inside our family who felt entitled to proximity with his wealth without having done anything to earn it, he was a problem. To me, for as long as I had been old enough to understand what it meant, he was the only adult in my life who consistently treated love as something given rather than something negotiated.

I had grown up in a family that understood money primarily as a mechanism of control. My father, Gerald Mercer, had a temperament that required deference the way a certain kind of engine requires a specific grade of fuel, and my mother Vivienne had spent her marriage learning to provide it and teaching the rest of us to do the same. The family operated on an implicit accounting system in which everything given was recorded and everything received was expected to be repaid with interest, usually in the form of compliance. I had been labeled difficult from an early age, which in the language of my family meant that I kept asking questions about the terms of transactions they preferred to present as expressions of love.