She was stealing from both of us, and letting Christopher do the ugly, incriminating, hands-on part of the crime, so that when it was discovered — as she must have known it eventually might be — it would be his name on the coercion, his fingerprints on the assault, his executive assistant on the forged notary seal, while the property flowed quietly into a trust with only her name on it.

She had built her son to be the fall.

And watching his face in that garage as he finally understood it — watching a grown man discover, in the wreckage of the crime he had just committed against his wife, that his own mother had been robbing him the entire time he thought they were robbing me together — I felt the pity, yes, for one clean second.

And then I remembered that no one had made him drag me across that floor, and the pity passed, and did not return.

His mother had used him.

That was real, and it was its own small tragedy.