I work for a federal contractor, and my days are spent inside other people’s financial crimes — the shell companies, the layered transfers, the forged authorizations, the theft dressed up as loans and gifts and management fees.

I know exactly what fraud looks like from the inside, because unwinding it is my profession, and I am, without false modesty, very good at it.

And here is the thing that had been quietly nagging at me for the better part of a year, that I had not let myself fully assemble until I sat in that living room being told I’d inherited a toy.

During his illness, my grandfather had asked me questions.

Careful ones.

He’d wanted to understand, he said, how irrevocable trusts worked, and what made a transfer of property legally airtight, and how a person would go about proving that a signature on a document was forged.