She turned the screen fully toward me and pointed at the line at the bottom.

Chapter 12 — The Number

The total, drained from the family over eighteen years, was one hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars.

Not all of it from Ethan’s trust — the rest had come out of our shared investments, secondary credit lines, and cash Marcus had tidily filed as “corporate entertainment” for the firm.

But enough of it from the trust.

I sat and looked at that six-figure number and could not speak, because I was doing my own arithmetic against it: the coupons I had clipped, the vacations I had skipped, the freelance accounting jobs I had taken at the kitchen table after Ethan was asleep, all so that we would never, ever have to touch our son’s education money.

I had been guarding a vault that my husband had been quietly emptying from the other side, for years, while presenting himself to the world as the generous man rescuing poor Evelyn from her hardships.