I waited a full five minutes, to be sure she was settled.

And then I opened my laptop at the dining room table, and I went to work, and I stopped being her husband and started being what I am.

Chapter 9 — Access Is Not Ownership

Here is the mistake at the very center of my wife’s scheme, the one that doomed it from the start, and it is a mistake I have watched clever criminals make a hundred times.

Months earlier, before this trip, Wendy had insisted — sweetly, reasonably — that I add her as an authorized household manager on our accounts, so that she could handle things while I traveled for work.

And I had agreed.