But why bring all that up? It wouldn’t make Ellen Mae feel any better. If you lost everything, it didn’t really ease your pain much to know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting even worse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges were mean-spirited people—the kind of people who thought it must be big fun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better. Sure, if he’d been poor, he’d have been dead long ago—he knew that. He wasn’t poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, he was going to stay that way. But that didn’t make his life a picnic. Let her talk.