I want to be clear about that, because a certain kind of person hears this part of the story and admires it as cleverness, as a satisfying game of cat and mouse, and it was not that, not to me.

Every trap I set was a small controlled experiment designed to answer a question I did not want answered.

Would my son go through my private drawers.

Would he repeat a false figure he could only have gotten by snooping.

Would he sit in his own home late at night and search for an account using a copy of my license he had stolen from my locked desk.

Each test I built was really a plea, underneath, a last desperate hope that this time he would fail to take the bait, that the trap would sit undisturbed and prove me wrong about my own child.