She took me in, she let me talk until I had no more words, and then she did the single most loving thing anyone did for me in that entire nightmare: she told me to check my accounts.

It was not warm advice.

It was not what I wanted to hear.

It was the advice of a person who loved me enough to want me protected rather than merely comforted — who understood, before I did, that the tears could wait but the money could not, that a woman in the first hours of a betrayal is being robbed in ways she can’t yet see and needs a friend clear-eyed enough to say so.

That is what a real friend is, I understood, sitting in her kitchen at two in the morning watching my savings account tell me the truth.

Not the one who knows the most about you.