“She is your mother, not mine. If she still wants to keep buying designer clothes on Fifth Avenue, then you start paying for them.”

The memories arrived uninvited, but they no longer felt suffocating.

Eleanor held up a bottle of perfume I had given her and said, “It’s beautiful, but your wife still looks like someone who doesn’t belong in places like this.”

Anthony shrugged as if it were nothing more than an unimportant observation.

His sister, Victoria, would laugh when I was working late and say, “A woman who is always chasing money forgets how to be a real wife.”

And yet, none of them hesitated to ask for financial help, presenting it as something temporary, necessary, or simply expected within a family that only remembered its unity when it needed something.