Money can buy almost anything

“Money can buy almost anything” functions in the novel as both a practical maxim and a compact expression of power. It appears whenever money converts an obstacle into an arrangement: a hostile workplace rule becomes negotiable, a captive woman’s debt becomes a ransom contract, a fabricated pregnancy becomes an operational plan, and a hurried wedding becomes immediately attainable. The expression therefore joins romance, coercion, deception, and privilege through the same economic logic.

Uses in Deception and Access

The phrase first operates as a blunt statement of instrumental power in the scheme involving Charlotte and Ella McCarthy. Charlotte has already arranged the practical conditions for their revenge plan: Jesse Barrett’s dog walker, Lynn, is expected to quit, leaving Jesse without help. When Ella questions how that supposedly accidental departure was arranged, Charlotte answers that “Money can buy anything.” The wording treats money not as a reward after an action but as the hidden mechanism that makes the action appear to happen by chance. Its force lies in the gap between coincidence and purchase: what looks like an ordinary staffing change has been engineered through financial influence.

A related but less dramatic use appears when Destiny Brown tries to explain Parker’s presence at her workplace. Caleb objects that special visitors are not allowed during working hours, while Parker rises into a defensive stance at the implication that he is being treated as an improper exception. Destiny says that Parker is merely waiting for her to finish, an answer that protects him socially without openly confronting the workplace rule. The scene does not state that money resolves the dispute, but it places the expression’s logic beside a world where access, status, and exceptions are regulated by institutions. In that context, the maxim illuminates the privilege Parker and Destiny are negotiating even when the phrase itself is not spoken.

Debt, Ransom, and Purchased Freedom

The expression acquires a darker meaning in the crisis surrounding Danita Valdez. Killian Flanagan rejects the suggestion that he and Ryan Higgins should kill the man holding power over them, explaining that doing so would require them to pay double Danita’s ransom to the Lion if they wanted to survive. Instead, he has made an agreement to buy Danita from him. The contract gives Killian a month to pay her debt plus another two hundred and fifty thousand dollars; if the money arrives in time, the Lion will leave Danita alone forever.

Here, money does not merely buy comfort or convenience. It is made to purchase a person’s safety from a system that has already converted her into debt and a ransom price. Killian’s refusal to choose murder and his decision to accept the financial burden create a moral contrast within the maxim. The logic remains transactional, but the transaction is used to interrupt further violence. At the same time, the arrangement exposes the coercive structure beneath the apparent rescue: Danita’s freedom depends on someone else’s ability to satisfy an imposed sum, so the purchase cannot be separated from the original injustice.

Marriage, Pregnancy, and the Speed of Wealth

The phrase returns in a warmer but still revealing register during the conversation about Ella McCarthy’s real pregnancy and her marriage to Jesse Barrett. Ella regrets that she had imagined a fancy wedding while planning a fake pregnancy, only to discover that she was genuinely pregnant. Jesse reassures her that they will have the wedding she wants. When she worries that a grand ceremony cannot be organized quickly because desirable venues book far in advance, he winks and says, “Money can buy almost anything.”

The expanded wording turns the maxim into a promise. Jesse is not presenting money as a weapon against another person; he is using it to answer Ella’s anxiety and make a shared future feel possible. Yet the sentence retains its materialist edge. Time, scarcity, and institutional limits remain real for people without sufficient resources, while Jesse’s wealth can compress those limits. The line consequently makes romantic reassurance depend on economic capacity: love supplies the desire for the wedding, but money is presented as the means of making desire visible and immediate.

Bodies, Gifts, and the Limits of Purchase

A more unsettling transformation of the expression occurs in the relationship between Sheridan and Maribel Arnaz. Sheridan explains that he recognized Maribel as the woman he had been seeking and states his purpose with stark directness: “To bear me a child.” Maribel understands the implication as a demand to become pregnant, and Sheridan confirms it. The passage does not use the maxim verbatim, but it supplies one of its most consequential applications. A woman’s body and reproductive future are treated as something that a powerful ruler may claim as the object of a search and a desired outcome.

This reproductive logic contrasts with Maskin’s grass necklace for Cheryl. Maskin presents the necklace as a personal gift, and Cheryl’s blush and small smile make the gesture reciprocal at the level of feeling. His history as a warrior-slave, whose only contact with women had been through orbots gifted to successful fighters for a night or two, makes the handmade necklace especially significant. It offers Cheryl an object created for her rather than a person treated as an object to be acquired. Read alongside the maxim’s other occurrences, the contrast distinguishes gift from purchase: a gift can invite recognition, while money can become a language of control when applied to debt, labor, marriage, or reproduction.

Significance of the Expression

“Money can buy almost anything” recurs because the surrounding stories repeatedly test what wealth can convert. Charlotte uses money to conceal manipulation inside an apparent coincidence. Killian uses it to negotiate Danita’s release from a ransom system. Jesse invokes it to promise Ella that pregnancy need not destroy her desired wedding. The same principle reaches its most troubling limit when reproductive capacity is treated as an acquisition. The expression’s significance is therefore double-edged: it acknowledges money’s extraordinary ability to alter circumstances, but its recurrence also reveals the danger of measuring freedom, affection, and human bodies through exchange. The word “almost” leaves a narrow remainder beyond purchase, and the novel’s relationships repeatedly inhabit that remainder—where consent, trust, love, and dignity cannot be guaranteed by payment alone.