I opened the folder with the lawyer watching and Megan shaking in the armchair.
Bank statements. Highlighted lines. Transfer after transfer, month after month, draining out of our savings into an account I did not recognize.
And a name at the top of it all. David Prewitt. The friend who had talked us, over dinners and golf and easy smiles, into letting him manage our money three years ago.
Megan had found it three weeks earlier. She had gone quiet and sick with it, because David was not just our advisor. He was a friend. He had been at our wedding. And she did not know how to tell me that a man we both trusted had been robbing us blind.
She had not been hiding an affair or a secret life, she had been sick with the dread of breaking my heart, because the thief was someone I loved and trusted, and she had gathered every piece of proof before she said a single word so that I would have to believe it.
The lawyer, whom Megan had quietly hired, had already built the case airtight.
I did not go and put my hands on David Prewitt, much as one part of me wanted to. I did the thing that actually takes a man like that down.
We handed everything to the state securities regulator and to the police. An advisor who steals from the people who trust him is not just a bad friend. He is a criminal, and there are laws written for exactly his kind, with teeth.
They investigated. And it turned out we were not the only ones. David had been quietly bleeding half a dozen families who thought of him as a friend, the way we did.
Most of our money came back, clawed out of the accounts where he had hidden it. The rest a victims fund covered. And David traded his golf clothes for something a great deal less comfortable.
Megan cried when it was over, and I understood at last that the fever, the shaking, the collapse, had all been the weight of protecting me from a truth she knew would break my heart.
It did break my heart, a little. A friend is a hard thing to lose to his own greed.
But my wife. My wife spent three sick, frightened weeks making certain that when the blow came, it came with proof in hand and a plan already moving, so that I would never be a helpless victim, only a man being handed back what was stolen.
I did not marry a woman who hides things from me. I married a woman who takes the hardest truths onto her own shoulders first, so she can carry them to me gently.
Our savings are safe. Our future is safe. And I know now exactly how fiercely my quiet wife will fight for both.