Twelve years.
The number was not lost on me.
He had given twelve years to defrauding my family, and the state gave him twelve years back, and somewhere in the symmetry of it I found something that wasn’t quite satisfaction and wasn’t quite peace but was adjacent to both.
The deeds the federal agents found in Efrain’s warehouse haunted me, though, and still do.
A dozen other families.
A dozen other kitchens, other paid-off houses, other trusting old people, other daughters who would come to understand too late what the charming man at Sunday dinner had really been doing with their mail.
I had thought, in my worst moments under that table, that I was uniquely foolish — that only a special kind of blindness could miss a twelve-year fraud in her own bed.
Those deeds cured me of that.
I hadn’t been uniquely foolish.
I had been targeted by a professional, one of several working the same territory, and the only thing that separated my family from the dozen in that warehouse was that my father had trusted his own bad feeling and gone quietly to an old friend and built a case, and that a daughter with an accountant’s eyes had driven over unannounced on a rainy night because she couldn’t shake a feeling of her own.
We hadn’t been smarter than those other families.
We had been luckier, and we had been warned by love.
That is the only difference, most of the time, between the people who get out and the people who don’t.
Chapter 26 — On Top of the Table