Because rage is useless, and I did not have time for it.

But a forged financial document — a forged financial document is a language I speak fluently.

My wife had just, without knowing it, filed her crime in the one filing cabinet in the world I knew how to open.

Because here is the thing about a forged financial document, the thing that makes it so different from every other kind of harm: it is permanent, and it is legible, and it does not change its story under pressure.

A bruise fades.

A witness can be intimidated, or discredited, or made to doubt her own memory — Wendy had spent a month doing precisely that to my mother, teaching her that her account of her life would not be believed.