I started to look.

And I found another receipt, and then another.

And then I stopped looking at individual transactions altogether and started looking at the shape of the whole: business trips that ran one night longer than the itineraries he told me; hotel parking charges that fell on the same nights as expensive dinners; money moving through accounts I recognized and then reappeared inside entities I did not.

When I asked him, once, back then, about a single transfer, he gently took the statement out of my hands and kissed my forehead and told me I was stressing myself over things I no longer understood.

He used a particular word. You haven’t worked in finance for years, Charlotte.

You don’t understand this stuff anymore. The word anymore stayed with me for weeks.