Evicting the Dynasty I Built

I have been alive for six centuries.

I watched a barefoot orphan girl, who once drove my wooden cart through freezing mud, build an empire from the silver coins I pressed into her chapped palms. Her bloodline carried that enterprise through twelve generations. And in this current generation, they produced what the financial press called a prodigy: a daughter who returned from abroad and inflated the family conglomerate’s valuation thirtyfold in her very first fiscal year.

To everyone else on the payroll, I was merely the phantom on the top floor—an ornamental relic who drew an unearned…