Admittedly, she didn’t track her bank account very carefully. She had never been taught to be fiscally responsible on her own. By the time she was seven or eight, she’d known there’d been a man in a tall office building who managed her money—not even her family’s money but her money, her trust. Back then, she’d pictured her money in a giant piggy bank. She’d never held a paying job in high school. In college, money just appeared in a bank account; she was always one of those people who could take unpaid internships, if she so chose, because she didn’t have to worry about paying rent. It was only after she was married that she learned to write a check, and when she bought this home, she’d been able to pay cash—she didn’t even have to juggle a mortgage. And she wouldn’t have to, unless her father decided to disown her.

Now, it occurred to her how unrealistic her life was. Did she want Arthur being so cavalier about finances? She made a mental note to think more about how to talk to Arthur about money, and then figured out the correct password and was into her bank details. As she started to scroll through the transactions, everything looked pretty normal: there were charges for bills, purchases, and transfers to investments that had been automatically put in place by that same financial guy who guarded her piggy bank. There was also a sizable sum of money to Silver Swans on the second of September. This was the payment for the first month of school, presumably; the ACH withdrawals would happen monthly. Tomorrow was October 2, when the next withdrawal was due.

But when Andrea scrolled back, she noticed a charge for $540 on August 15 that she couldn’t place. She clicked on the details, figuring it was probably clothes or a day trip she and Arthur had taken, but only a jumble of numbers came up. She frowned and then, thinking about what Jerry had just said, clicked on the September Silver Swans charge once more.

The money in that charge had gone to a bank account in Silver Swans’ name. The money in the $540 charge had gone into a different account number . . . but only slightly different, she noticed. The routing number was the same. The account number was only different by a few digits, as though the two accounts might have been set up within days or even hours of each other.

Two weeks earlier in August, there was a charge for $680—this also went to the mysterious account. Andrea found three more charges dating back to June. Then they stopped. Together, it totaled nearly $3,000.

She sat back, making the chair creak. First, she was disgusted with herself that she hadn’t noticed $3,000 missing. And then a different kind of anger followed.