“To coming home early, Luca,” she said.

I touched my glass to hers, and the small clear sound of it carried out over the water as the sun went down.

For six years, my wife had mocked my patience, and my quietness, and my mildness, and called them weakness, and told her friends I was too soft to survive without her.

She had built her entire scheme on the certainty that the harmless numbers guy would never see, and would never fight, and could never win.

And in the end it was that exact patience — the discipline she mistook for cowardice, the quiet she mistook for weakness, the boring careful documenting man she mistook for a fool — that gave me every single piece of evidence I needed to protect my mother, to dismantle the lies, and to take back, down to the last stolen dollar, everything she had tried to steal.

Wendy was right about one thing only.