“My Wife Handles the Paperwork, I Handle the Assets,” He Told the Contractor. He Never Read What He’d Signed

What undid him was not the wanting of the money; it was his certainty that he didn’t have to ask, that my accounts were his to reach into, that forging my name was less trouble than requesting my consent.

His contempt was so total that he skipped the step where he might have kept me on his side, and in skipping it he turned a marriage I might have gone on subsidizing forever into a felony with a paper trail.

He didn’t just steal from me.

He documented, in his own forged hand, that he had never once considered me a person whose permission was worth obtaining.

And the bank, it turned out, took a very dim view of that indeed.