Her trust was not an obstacle he overcame; it was the tool he selected.

He looked at his mother — the woman who knitted his baby mitten and kept it forty years in her bedside drawer — and he did not see a person to protect.

He saw a clean account, above scrutiny, attached to a woman too sick to notice and too loving to believe the worst of him.

That is the particular evil of the man I was married to: he could look at love, at trust, at the deepest and most defenseless kind of devotion, and see, instead of something sacred, an opportunity.

He did it to his mother.

He did it, in his own way, to me.