Melissa did not speak to me for three weeks. When she finally came over, she did not arrive crying or demanding another chance. She stood on my porch in the rain and said she had been scared, ashamed, and desperate to keep up with people who seemed to buy homes without ever worrying about a payment. I told her I understood fear. I did not understand asking her daughter to pay for it. Ava started nursing school that fall and sent me a photograph from outside the science building in blue scrubs, holding a coffee too large for one hand. Leonard would have loved it. I keep that picture beside his old savings-bond folder, not because money is the important part, but because the account did what we meant for it to do. It stayed where love had placed it. Sometimes protecting someone does not look like giving them more. Sometimes it looks like refusing to let the people closest to them take what was never theirs to spend.