The biggest secret was not the money. It was why Sebastian had made his fortune outside the family in the first place.I found it going through his private files that winter. Bartholomew helped me, and Bartholomew, it turned out, had helped Sebastian build the whole structure. Sebastian did not separate his wealth from the Ellsworths because he wanted to escape them. He did it because forty years earlier, his father had stolen the family company from Sebastian’s own uncle, cut the man out entirely, and left that side of the family with nothing. Sebastian grew up watching cousins he loved fall into poverty while his mother, Rosalind, hosted galas on money that was never honestly hers.

He built six hundred and fifty million dollars from scratch, quietly, over a lifetime, so that he would never have to touch a fortune he believed was stolen. And in his final papers he left instructions I did not expect. He wanted the memorial fund to make it right. He named the descendants of the uncle his father ruined. Delphine, it turned out, was one of them. Rosalind had married in on the wrong side of a theft she spent her whole life defending, and did not know it.