And if I refused to sign, they’d report me to the authorities for corporate fraud — say I’d embezzled from the company.

Your mother said no one would believe a lonely wife over the family.” Her voice was flat with exhaustion.

“She said it so many times I started to believe it too.”

I asked do you trust me first, before anything else — before the calls, before the plan, before a single word about what I intended to do — and I need to explain why, because it was the most important choice I made in the whole affair.

Every instinct I had wanted to lead with rage on her behalf, to tell her what I was going to do to them, to promise vengeance, to be the returning soldier who sets it all right.

But I understood, looking at her flat exhausted face, that a promise of rescue from me was just one more man telling her what was going to happen to her body and her life without asking.