I did not need to have investigated Vanessa from the start.

I needed only to have been willing, when the evidence came, to believe it over my own hopes.

That willingness, in the end, is the whole of it.

I had not been outsmarted.

I had been trusted into, which is a different and more humbling thing.

Chapter 13 — Fifteen Thousand Dollars

To explain how I already knew as much as I did, I have to go back three days, to a thing that had been set in motion in my office while I was still on the other side of the country.

I will keep the mechanics of it deliberately vague, because the details of how someone tries to steal from a company are not something worth spelling out for anyone who might be looking for ideas.