Most mothers your age would love having family manage things.” Sheldon would not meet my eyes.

I found the first theft the way I had found a hundred others in my working life — not through suspicion, but through habit.

I read my own statements the way I had once read other people’s, line by line, and one morning a line did not belong: a withdrawal I had not made, in an amount round enough to be deliberate.

A less careful woman might have missed it, or assumed a bank error, or asked her son to look into it.

I did not ask my son to look into it, because a lifetime of this work had taught me a hard rule: when money goes missing from a household, you do not hand the investigation to the household.

So I looked myself.