He was a man who had found, in his mother, a lifelong collaborator in the project of living off me.

The patience I’d spent seven years extending to the weak man I’d invented had been a gift to two people who were laughing about it over my father-in-law’s good scotch.

Chapter 10 — Dual Authorization

But it was the way he had taken the forty thousand that turned a betrayal into a crime.

Our emergency account — the one my grandmother’s careful voice in my head had insisted we set up — required two authorizations for any withdrawal over ten thousand dollars.

Mine and his, both.