Richard stared out toward the road, as if some part of him genuinely believed I might turn my car around and drive back to fix everything.
I was already in the air by then.
When I landed in Denver, my oldest friend Nina Patel was waiting for me right outside the terminal. Nina was both a family-law attorney and the one person on this earth who had believed me, without hesitation, the very first time I’d admitted that money kept quietly disappearing from an account it shouldn’t have been touching.
Six months earlier, I’d started noticing small withdrawals from an account Richard was never supposed to have access to. Each amount had been kept low enough to look like an honest accident. Twelve thousand for equipment. Nine thousand for an emergency vendor payment. Seventeen thousand labeled, almost cheerfully, as a temporary loan.
Together, they added up to one hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars.
