If my flight had left on schedule, I would have arrived Thursday to a tidy story about a thieving housekeeper already dismissed, and I would very likely have believed it.

That thought has kept me up on more than one night since.

Not the danger to myself, which was only money, but the near-certainty of what would have happened to Teresa if the timing had gone the other way.

She would have been gone by Thursday, dismissed in disgrace, a false confession on file in her own hand, perhaps a police report hanging over her and her son, thirteen years of loyalty erased in an afternoon by a story told well enough.

And I, tired from travel and trusting the wrong person, would have signed off on all of it, might even have been persuaded not to give her a reference.