The Whole Town Swore the Old Man at the End of the Trail Had Murdered His Wife and Buried Her by His Shed — I Believed Them and Nearly Called the Police, Until My Five-Year-Old Walked Onto His Porch, and a Letter His Dying Wife Left Behind Shamed Every Rumor in Pine Ridge

The embezzlement was arithmetic.

And I understood, standing there, that I had been mourning the wrong loss.

I had thought the tragedy was that my husband had stopped loving me.

The real tragedy, the one those pages revealed, was that at some point my husband had stopped seeing me as a person at all, and started seeing me as an obstacle between himself and a pile of money — and you do not have affairs with obstacles.

You remove them.