“I’ll take care of Chloe.

And with the extra deployment stipend, we can finally finish remodeling the house.”

The house.

That, I would come to understand, was the crux of everything.

Because the house was not ours jointly.

My Aunt Ellen had willed it to me, outright, four years before I ever met George: a spacious two-story home with a small courtyard and a separate commercial storefront out front, a storefront in which Fiona had set up her nail salon without ever paying a cent of rent, because, as George always explained, family helps family.

It was my inheritance, my aunt’s last gift to me, legally and entirely mine.

And before I left, I took one precaution that would, in the end, prove important.

I handed George a secondary debit card, tied to an account strictly for groceries, tuition, medicines, and household utilities, and I told him plainly: “The main savings account is not to be touched.” For just a fraction of a second, something shifted in his expression, a flicker I noticed and dismissed.

Then he kissed my forehead.

“Of course, sweetheart,” he said.

“Who do you think I am?” I did not yet know the answer to that question.

I was about to find out.

That flicker in his expression, the one I noticed and dismissed when I told him the savings account was not to be touched, has become, in memory, a kind of emblem of the whole thing, of the way I spent years seeing warning signs clearly and then talking myself out of them.