The receipts, which I obtained later, proved that the food had gone straight to my mother’s house, for a dinner party she hosted while my wife went hungry two miles away.

Chapter 12 — A Little Discomfort

And then I found the recording that turned a terrible domestic betrayal into a set of felonies, and I want to describe it plainly, because a judge would later watch it in silence, and because it is the reason I feel no guilt whatsoever about what happened to the two women in it.

My mother and my sister are standing in my kitchen.

They do not know they are being recorded; they never knew, in any of it, which is exactly why the recordings are so complete.

“The account has thirty-eight grand,” Stephanie says, low.