“It sounds like recognizing your own feet,” I said.

Three days after that, she said, the FBI came to her door like a plot twist. Richard had been under investigation for months for fraud that made my brain feel like tumbleweed. Her cooperation sealed something. He was arrested. The assets he had “managed” from a pedestal of condescension untangled themselves into accounts that, the lawyer said with a thin-lipped smile, were always partly hers. Paper tells the truth, eventually.

She nudged the gold box toward me. Inside, under tissue that sounded expensive when I moved it, was a photograph of her and Ethan in an apartment with white walls and one of those big windows that makes trees look like they were painted for you. There was an envelope—heavier than it should be—with a cashier’s check for more money than I’d seen in one place on paper. My face did that thing where all the expressions arrive at once.

“I can’t,” I started, reflex.