The neat cursive should have been a clue that I was wrong; careful handwriting in soft leather is not the aesthetic of the criminal underworld.

The red checkmarks should have suggested a hobby, a satisfying record of small successes, not an illicit ledger.

The very tidiness of everything, the almost fussy care of it, pointed clearly toward a gentle domestic passion and away from anything sinister.

But I did not weigh any of those clues, because I was no longer weighing.

I was confirming.

My mind had picked its verdict up in the first thirty seconds, under the mattress, and everything after that was just the prosecution calling witnesses.

I think this is the most unsettling thing I took away from the whole morning: the discovery of how easily my own mind would build a fortress around a false idea and then defend it against all the evidence of my own eyes.