I had widened the audit.

That decision — not to confront, but to widen — is the one I am most often asked about, and the one that best explains the difference between the woman my husband thought he’d married and the woman he actually had.

A wife who discovers her husband is both cheating and stealing has, in that moment, a powerful urge to do something immediate and loud: to throw the earrings in his face, to scream, to make him feel, right then, the full force of her hurt.

I felt that urge.

I am not a saint; I felt it in my whole body.

And I set it down, because I had learned, running my mother’s firm, that the loud immediate satisfying move is almost always the weak one.