It was my profession, and I was very good at it.

When I married into the Sterling family, I had, at their request, helped with the books of the family business — and in doing so, I had come to know that business more intimately than anyone alive, every filing, every vendor ledger, every cash flow.

And six months before the night Wendy put me in the hospital, in the ordinary course of looking at numbers the way I cannot help but look at numbers, I had found something.

Wendy Sterling had been systematically stealing from the family company, for years, through a web of fraudulent vendor invoices — fake companies, billing for services never rendered, the money flowing into accounts she controlled.