Loans refinanced a little too often.

None of it was proof of anything.

All of it was the faint, familiar smell that makes an auditor slow down, and I had been slowing down for weeks without letting myself say why.

A married woman should not have to hide her own handwriting under a cushion in her own home.

I knew that even then.

I simply did not yet understand what I was protecting it from.

We talked, if you could call it that, about the guest list, which had reached four hundred.