Yet somehow, between setting up a group disability policy for a doctor’s office, quoting a huge car dealership’s health insurance, lunch with Gabe and the owner of three hundred apartments we were trying to woo, and an afternoon of playing catch-up on emails and a few walk-ins, I had managed to check out something I was avoiding. It was just a chat room, one of those simple things that I had come across while—dangerously—googling “Bill Sitterly.” And sure, I had found furious messages from multi-multimillionaires who had lost one of their millions. But I also found notes from retired couples who had given Bill their entire retirement and lost everything. Men going back to work as greeters at Walmart. Women going back to doing hair despite the arthritis crippling their fingers.

It was a horrible feeling. I thought about Alice, about how she’d seen me in the bank that day, and wanted to help. And I suddenly got the feeling that I wanted to help too. Maybe it wasn’t my responsibility, necessarily, to give these people back what they had lost. But I began to feel that way.

I was trying to shake the heaviness I felt on my drive home, the thoughts running through my head that I did not want to have. The town was aflutter with the idea that Bill was innocent. But was it enough? What if he went to jail anyway? What if he had been framed so well that he took the fall for something he didn’t do? And, worst of all, what if he was lying to me? What if he was guilty? I had been so great at pushing those thoughts away that they took my breath away as they all flooded in now.

If that was the case, I would never get my money back. Never get my house back. Iris and I would really, truly have to start over. And, while my job at Montoya & Sons was getting us by, if I had to make a full-on fresh start, it had to be in New York where everyone wasn’t talking about my family. I didn’t want Iris to have to leave her friends. But it was the only way. I could get a job with Bradley, make a new start for us, pay those people back—at least the ones who had lost everything. I probably couldn’t fix everyone’s problems, but I could fix some.

I would say it was a weird or coincidental time for Bradley to call, but wasn’t that what life was like? You thought of someone, and they appeared in line behind you in the grocery store. You wanted to go on a trip to the Caribbean, and suddenly all you saw was pictures of boats in clear water. (Side note: I desperately missed being the person planning those vacations.)