Every irregular deposit into the dying woman’s account corresponded to an email, to a wire, to a contract Julian had steered to his uncle’s firm.

It was not, and had never been, a secret family nest egg.

Julian had used his ailing mother’s private bank account as a laundry — running the illegal kickbacks he collected for rigging vendor contracts through the accounts of the woman whose pills I crushed into applesauce, whose sheets I changed, who trusted him because she was, after all, his mother and mothers are built to trust.

He had made his dying mother, without her knowledge, the launderer of his crimes.

Of everything I learned that night, that was the thing that made me feel I might actually be sick.

I have tried, since, to understand what kind of person does that — not the theft itself, which is common enough, but the specific choice to route it through your own mother.