That’s how he referred to it: His Previous Life. As though he’d already moved out of it and into a greater place. He rambled on about the places he would go, the things he would do, never once telling me how he might acquire the means to achieve all these tremendous feats. It had taken me centuries to establish my own fortune. And still more time to attend to it. Money is like any other profession. You had to look in on it, make sure no one else had decided they liked it better than you did and run off with it. I found such things boring and loathsome in the extreme. But I still had to do it. I just don’t like to talk about it.