He laughed softly. “That was always ambitious.”
“It was never about the money,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “It was about access.”
We stood there in silence for a while, looking over the city that had nearly consumed each of us in different ways.
“Owen wants to come by Sunday,” Marcus said. “He wants to show you the financial model he made for a lemonade stand.”
“Does it include overhead?”
“It includes depreciation on a folding table.”
I smiled. “Then yes. Obviously.”
He leaned against the railing. “You know the funniest part?”
“There are several candidates.”
“That they thought they understood money because they understood greed.”
He was right. Ryan and his family mistook appetite for intelligence. They believed wanting something badly enough made them entitled to it. They thought wealth was a static object waiting to be transferred, not a system of discipline, judgment, skill, and responsibility. They could see the fruit, but not the roots.
That is why predators like them miscalculate so often.