To Radley the transfers were a scheme; to Ellard they were the last way he had left to love his daughter.

Every dollar he sent, he sent as if he were sending it to Sidonie — as if by keeping her child fed and clothed and doctored he was completing the sentence her death had cut off, being the father to her son that he could no longer be to her.

He would sit at his kitchen table on the first of the month and set up the transfer, and it was almost a devotion, a small monthly rite of grief and love.

He never suspected because the money was never the point for him, and so it never occurred to him to audit it, to demand receipts, to treat it as the transaction it secretly was.

You do not ask a shrine for a receipt.

Radley had understood that, and had counted on it — had turned a grieving father’s love into a reliable monthly income precisely because he knew that love, unlike a business arrangement, asks no questions.