I am a careful person.

I did not take her advice as seriously as I should have.

I want to be fair to myself about why, because it was not recklessness.

It was that I had come to understand something Karina, from the safety of her office, could not fully weigh: that the window was closing.

Every day brought the wedding nearer, and the wedding was the point past which my signature on that loan would stop mattering, because my assets would become his and the forgery would be absorbed into a legal marriage like a drop of ink into a glass of water, impossible to isolate afterward.

I did not have the luxury of a careful, unhurried investigation conducted from a distance.