The payment had been made, in eleven of thirty-six months, out of the joint account.

My account.

Automatically, by a transfer I had set up in 2020 as a backstop and had never turned off, and which had quietly become the primary mechanism, because when his payment did not go, mine did.

And underneath that was the other thing.

Between March 2023 and January 2025 — which is to say, from the month Brenda arrived — Mitchell had transferred fifty-eight thousand, four hundred dollars out of the joint account to his sister.

It was not one transfer.