I start to turn away, making a mental note to discuss this with Owen when he gets home—let him decide whether she keeps the joint or hands it over. But then it hits me. I have no idea when Owen will be home. I have no idea where he is now.

“You know what?” I say. “I’m going to take that.”

She rolls her eyes but hands the joint over. I shove it into the glove compartment and reach down to pick up the duffel bag.

“I started counting it…” she says.

I look up at her.

“The money,” she says. “Each roll has ten thousand dollars in it. And I got to sixty. When I stopped counting.”

“Sixty?”

I start grabbing the loose rolls of money that have fallen on the seats, on the floor, and put them back inside the bag. Then I zip it closed, so she won’t have to contemplate the enormous stash inside anymore. So neither of us will.

Six hundred thousand dollars. Six hundred thousand dollars and counting.

“Lynn Williams reposted all these Daily Beast tweets to her Insta Stories,” she says. “All about The Shop and Avett Thompson. How he’s like Madoff. That’s what one of them said.”

I go back through what I know—sharp, fast. Owen’s note to me. The duffel bag for Bailey. The radio report suggesting embezzlement and massive fraud. Avett Thompson the mastermind of something I’m still trying to understand.

I feel like I’m in one of those twisted dreams that only happen when you go to sleep at the wrong time, the afternoon sun or midnight chill greeting you upon waking, disorienting you—and leaving you to turn to the person next to you, the person you trust most, looking for clarity. It was only a dream: There is no tiger under the bed. You weren’t just chased through the streets of Paris. You didn’t jump off the Willis Tower. Your husband didn’t disappear, leaving you no explanation, leaving his daughter six hundred thousand dollars. And counting.

“We don’t have that information yet,” I say. “But even if it’s true that The Shop is involved in something, or if Avett did something illegal, that doesn’t mean that your father had anything to do with it.”

“Then where is he? And where did he get this money!”

She is yelling at me because she wants to be yelling at him. It’s a feeling I can relate to. I’m just as angry as you are, I want to say. And the person I want to say it to is Owen.