Then I called my son, and I said the sentence I’d said a hundred times in my career, and never once imagined I’d say about my own family.
“Emmett. I found it. I can show you exactly which account she stopped thinking anyone would look at.”
Chapter 4: The Line on Alder Street
The confrontation with Thea was quiet, in the end, the way the worst reckonings are.
There was no screaming. I set the folder on Emmett’s kitchen table and opened it, and I walked my son through three years of his wife’s work, line by line, in the flat patient voice I’d used my whole life.
Thea tried, once, to call it a misunderstanding.
I turned to the page with the forged senior-residence invoices and the account in her name, and she stopped talking, because there is no misunderstanding a man who traces money for a living out of the thing he’s holding in his hand.
