My hand stayed on the mouse.

“Mom?

Are you going to send it?”

“No.”

She waited, and I looked at the request again, and for the first time I let myself read the words printed beneath the amount instead of only the amount itself.

INTERNATIONAL WIRE REQUEST.

And I wondered, finally, the question I should have wondered first, before the compliment and the hurry and the spilled milk: why did this man need all of it, and need it so fast?

That was the question, and I am a little ashamed it took me until the third reading to ask it, because it is the first question — the question underneath every scam that has ever worked.