He Married a Forensic Accountant and Decided Fraud Was a Good Hobby. He Forgot Who My Father Was

He had run his little frauds through the joint accounts of a professional whose entire trade is finding money that has been moved where it shouldn’t be.

It would have been almost funny if it hadn’t been my life.

He had looked at me for two years and seen someone small — a wife, an heiress-of-nothing, a woman to be handled — and the smallness had never been mine.

It had been his, the whole time, projected onto me because he needed me to be smaller than he was.

And now the projection had dropped away and he was looking at the actual person, in her own living room, with three squared folders on the table and her billionaire father in the rocking chair holding the baby, and I could see him doing the arithmetic of it and arriving at the correct and ruinous total.