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“What would you do with all that space? Would you get a roommate?” I wondered next.

“A roommate?” he repeated. “No, no way. I’ll be very happy to live on my own there, with no neighbors cooking onions and no one to report on me to my grandfather, like Vera from the garden apartment does. By the way, thanks for coming with me today.”

I had been surprised that he’d wanted me to, but I’d said yes when he’d suggested it on our run this morning. “I’m glad to. I’m interested in seeing where you’ll end up,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we’re friendly now, but once you move…you know,” I answered.

“We won’t be friendly anymore?”

“Probably not. It just happens when you go someplace else,” I explained. “It’s hard to hold on to people.”

“You’re thinking about your mother,” he said. “I don’t agree that the people you talk about were actually her friends. They sound more like they were using her for a place to stay and simultaneously hitting on her.”

“She’s very pretty,” I told him.

“I believe it, looking at you,” Oliver said. I gaped at him but he kept talking. “The question I have is how that all worked. How was your mother able to travel around and afford to have people live off her?”

It took me a moment to answer because I had to recover from the shock of his compliment. “She can afford it because of my grandparents. They set up trusts—well, their lawyer did. They listen to him and he insists on protecting assets and doing tax planning. She lives off that money and when I was born, he set up one for me, too. That’s why I can live in the Milaflores Building, even though I haven’t gotten any more editing clients and even though I don’t get paid very well by the ones that I have.”

“I see,” he said.

Since I wasn’t the driver, I could study him closely to observe his reactions. “It’s so lucky for us, and I totally understand how it makes me look.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it looks like I’m someone who doesn’t understand the value of hard work and what it takes to make it on your own. It looks like I’m the kind of person who lives off the generosity of others. A leech.”

“To me, it just looks lucky. I don’t see that it’s a bad thing at all.”

“It can sometimes make people want to get close to you for the wrong reasons,” I said. “Like my mom’s friends. You’re right—they weren’t. If she hadn’t been able to pay for their lifestyle, then they wouldn’t have wanted to stick around. But it is amazingly lucky for me, because I got to go to boarding school and college, and now I get to live on my own and try to make a business.”

“How did your grandparents become so wealthy?”

“It wasn’t them, because they were lucky, too. It was my great-grandparents.” I told him how they’d lived in New York and how they’d hung out with a bunch of artists. “My great-grandmother had gone to art school and my great-grandpa worked for the MTA and had a steady paycheck. They had money and an apartment, which made them popular. They threw fun parties and also let people stay with them if they needed a hand when they were starting their careers.”

“How did that make your great-grandparents rich?” he asked.

It was the art. “They got pieces as gifts from those friends. And my great-grandma and grandpa would go to galleries with them and pick out more art, until their apartment was absolutely full of everything. They had a son, my grandfather, and by the time he was growing up, their collection was worth a lot. They had been friends with people who became very famous later, like Francisca Dotada. Laurent Astre. Wirtuoz. Gestirn.”

“I’ve heard of some of those people.”

“Their works are very, very valuable and that’s where the money came from,” I explained. “My grandparents have lived off that and now my mom and I do, too.”

“Except that you also work,” he pointed out. “Do they?”

“My mom has her projects. My grandparents take care of their collection and travel. They display it at various art shows, like a big one in Venice and another in Miami. They go all over the world. I’ve only met them twice, and once was when I was really little and I don’t even remember it. The other time was for photographs.”

“For what?”

“The reason that they stepped in about my education was because there was going to be a big profile about them in an art magazine that they thought was very important. It had been ok that my mom was doing her vagabond stuff but their attorney made them see how it would look when everyone read that I had never been to school, that my mom didn’t believe in books and that she was telling me that the Earth was probably flat but who knew? We would never be able to prove it either way.”

I watched his jaw drop. “There is absolutely proof that the Earth is a sphere.”

“I know. My mom says that she’s keeping an open mind about everything,” I said. “It could have come off as cute and retro-hippie in the profile, but the attorney pointed out that it wouldn’t be so cute if someone asked me what the capital of the United States was and I didn’t know. And I think they were also concerned about my welfare, at least a little bit. I had sometimes heard my mom’s side of the conversations when they talked on the phone and she would argue with my grandfather about how I was doing.” But they had never answered when I had tried to reach out, not until the profile in the art magazine.

“They didn’t care enough to do anything for twelve years,” Oliver said. Then he winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shared that.”