Jason’s problem, his lawyer explained to him, was not that I had tricked him.

It was that I had documentation of everything, and documentation, in a courtroom, is destiny.

There is a bitter and beautiful justice in that, and I have turned it over many times.

For years, the exact quality that my husband’s family held in contempt — my carefulness, my record-keeping, my refusal to let a dollar move without knowing where it went — was the quality they mocked me for most freely.

Cold, they called it.

Controlling. No one constantly counting every single dollar, Chloe had said, as though counting dollars were a character flaw rather than the reason there had always been dollars to count.