Patterns Were My Profession

Patterns had been my profession.

For forty years I had made my living seeing the things other people’s eyes slid past, the tiny inconsistencies, the details that did not fit, the places where a story and the evidence quietly failed to agree.

I had spent a career listening to numbers tell me which of the humans around them were lying.

And my son, in his certainty that I had become a harmless old woman, had left patterns everywhere.

He had left them in the bank records and the forged documents and the photographs and the timing of things.