I had expected to find, at the bottom of that panel, the ordinary machinery of a man stealing money, and money is a thing I know how to feel clearly about.

What I found instead reorganized the whole of my fear into something closer to awe, the cold awe you feel standing at the edge of how far a person will go.

The money, it turned out, was almost the least of it.

The money was only the reason.

The thing itself, the actual thing he had done, was to take a living woman, his own sister, and declare her dead, and bury an empty name, and accept the condolences of four hundred people at a memorial for a person he knew to be sitting in a clinic across an ocean, and then to go on, year after year, writing a check every month to maintain the lie, and to have done all of it so smoothly that a decade had passed and no one had so much as asked the question.

I stood in that dark study and understood that I had been engaged to a man who could do that, and keep it behind a four-inch panel, and come home and ask me to wear a high collar for a photograph.