That is the part that still costs me something to say.
Not that they stole from me — people steal — but that I handed one of them the keys myself, gift-wrapped, out of love.
Delphine knew every account.
She knew my signature well enough to forge it, because she’d watched me sign a thousand documents across a thousand lunches.
She knew the exact emotional pressure points that would keep me from looking too closely at the books, because she’d spent a decade learning where I was tender.
She had admired those pearl earrings in my jewelry box on an ordinary Tuesday, holding them up to her own ears in my mirror.
I’d thought nothing of it.
I think now that she was already measuring my life for herself — the earrings, the husband, the house — trying each of them on to see how they’d fit.
And they fit her fine.
That was the terrible thing I’d learn.