Because here is the thing. I knew.

Of course I knew. I had been in the house. I had been in that damp back room when he came in at midnight and told me to hold on a few more days.

He never sat me down and confessed a plan, but I am not a stupid woman, and I had spent five months in a place where I stayed alive by knowing what people meant instead of what they said.

I knew there was no four hundred thousand dollars, and I let it happen, and then for a year I did not once ask about it.

Not because I’d forgotten. Because asking would have made it a thing that existed, and I had a house and a garden and a job and hair coming in, and I wanted all of it more than I wanted to be a person who asked.

Fourteen months of standing between other people and their paperwork. I could hear the truck in the driveway.