Are you okay?” I couldn’t speak.

I pointed at the screen.

I had checked the account, before that morning, perhaps twice a year — a habit of trust I had mistaken for a virtue.

It felt like decency, not to police the people I loved, not to hover over an account they had access to, not to treat my own parents like suspects.

I see now that it was not decency; it was fear dressed as generosity.

Some part of me had always known that if I looked too closely at where my money went, I might find something I could not un-see, and finding it would force a choice I did not want to make.