That is not a moral I went looking for; I would have vastly preferred an ordinary marriage and a father who was never robbed.

But it is the truth of what happened, and I have made my peace with it.

There is a version of me, in some other life, who was never tested this way — a softer, easier, more trusting woman who kept her father’s fortune and her comfortable marriage and never once had to learn what she was made of.

I don’t envy her.

She never got to find out that the thing at her center, the thing three clever people spent years trying to fold down and erase, does not fold and does not erase.