"It's an enormous amount of money."
"I know the number. I worked with numbers before you could spell them."
He smiled faintly, then grew serious. "I'm worried about your security. You've always told me not to spend money just because I have it."
Christina dried her hands with a dish towel. "I spent years listening to your grandfather tell me that prudence meant never enjoying anything. Samuel was very good at saving for the future. Sometimes I think he forgot that the future eventually arrives." She pulled out a chair and sat down.
"I have the house, a pension, insurance, and more savings than I expected after selling the building. I talked to the adviser. I checked it twice. I'm allowed to make a decision of my own."
William sat across from her. The little drawing was visible on the refrigerator behind her, and he stared at it as though seeing it for the first time in years. He remembered making it on a rainy evening when he had asked Samuel whether sports cars were expensive. Samuel had told him yes, very, and then spent an hour explaining why fast machines required the kind of maintenance a sensible person ought to investigate before purchasing them.
"I didn't even know you kept that," William said.
"Of course I kept it. Your grandfather fixed it when you tore it. I couldn't throw away his repair, could I?"
"I remember tearing it," William murmured. "I don't remember why."
"You had a bad day at school. You said people kept telling you what you couldn't be, and you were tired of wanting things that weren't meant for you. Samuel told you being afraid of losing a dream wasn't a reason to stop dreaming."
William lowered his eyes. He had spent years building a business partly to prove that the adults who saw his childhood as a list of disadvantages were wrong. For the first time in a long while, he wondered whether he had confused achievement with the ability to outrun those memories. He owned buildings, invested in companies, and signed checks without checking the grocery budget first, yet the sight of his grandmother humiliated over a car had made him feel like a powerless boy again.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"What for?"
"For owning part of a business where that could happen. I should have known."
She studied him. "Did you tell that man to treat people like dirt?"
"No."
"Did you teach your people that kindness was optional?"
"No. But I invested there. My name is on the ownership papers. Responsibility doesn't disappear because I wasn't in the building."
Christina nodded slowly, pleased that he understood the difference. "Then don't spend all your energy feeling guilty. Find out what happened. Make sure the next woman doesn't leave there feeling the way I did. That's a better use of your time."
William leaned back and looked at the ceiling. It was the same one he used to stare at after being grounded for doing something foolish, waiting for Christina to give a long speech he already knew by heart. Instead she would often ask what he planned to do differently. She rarely confused shame with improvement, and she had no intention of letting him confuse them now.