Each of those was a choice, made in a quiet moment, by a man who believed no one who mattered would ever look.

He had built a small machine for taking money, and he had oiled it, and he had run it for six months in the confidence of a person who has never once been caught.

I had sat across dinner tables from that man.

I had slept beside him.

And some part of me kept waiting, that night, for a reading of the numbers that would let him off — a coincidence, an innocent explanation, a version where the husband I’d married was still somewhere inside the man on the page.

The numbers offered none.