I watched the color go out of Julian’s face as it landed.

Seventy-two thousand dollars.

I had known there was money missing; I had not, until that moment, heard the full number said aloud, and even I felt it in my chest.

There is a thing that happens when a large theft is finally said as a single number, out loud, in front of witnesses, and it is different from knowing the number privately.

Privately, seventy-two thousand dollars had been an abstraction to me, a figure on a spreadsheet, a discrepancy I had traced.