It wasn’t like James to move into the house and stay by his mother’s side until the end. This was both unnecessary, since he was the executor of the will and already knew exactly what he was getting, and “not terribly social,” since he had a number of old friends to catch up with. So he camped out at the family “farm” in the wooded hills an hour northeast of the city and threw a number of parties. The farm was a large stone house, built in the late 1800s, which had been recently renovated by a Japanese architect friend of James’s with offices in London and New York. It had every green feature on the market, from toilets to energy supply, and was tucked into fifteen hundred acres of untouched woodlands. When trying to figure out a best-case number for the size of the family fortune, and what a first cousin’s piece of the inheritance might be, Noah would factor in the price of this land as if it were rezoned for residential development. The number was astronomical. But Noah knew that the rich didn’t get rich by giving it away.
