Of course she’d really known before that, hadn’t she? Maybe not the specifics, but she knew there was something going on. Something untoward. From the very beginning, there was so much money. None of the wives talked about where the money came from, they knew that a simple trucking business couldn’t make money like that unless it was trucking something very, very illegal. Drugs or jewels or people.

The wives didn’t let themselves think too much about it. They definitely didn’t talk about it. They spent it, and they enjoyed it—they practically bathed in it—but they didn’t talk about it.

There was so much of everything. Clothes, cars. A vacation at a five-star resort in Mexico where Katie played in the pool while Bobby and Sherri drank champagne that cost four hundred and fifty dollars a bottle. Sherri didn’t even blink when Bobby ordered it. When she drank it, it tasted like money. They had friends with yachts; they had friends with shares in private planes and vacation homes they’d never set foot in.

The first time Sherri found the hiding place there were two boxes full of hundred-dollar bills in there. Full. There must have been tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands. She didn’t count it. She just put it away, and she lined the floor tiles back up, and she put the register back too.

The next time, the money was gone, and there was a box inside a box inside a box—like an ominous set of Russian dolls—and inside the smallest box were twenty large diamonds.

Another time: cocaine, divided in tiny bags, like snacks for a preschool class. Once there were five fake passports, all for different people. Sherri saw all of it. She saw the laptop that looked exactly like the laptop on Bobby’s desk but wasn’t. (She tried to figure out the password for that laptop many times, but always stopped before it locked up. She tried her birthday and Katie’s birthday and their wedding anniversary and Bobby’s eight-hundred-meter time from high school. Nothing worked.)

It became her hobby, to keep an eye on the hiding place. It was like knitting or learning Spanish, but different. It was what Sherri did besides looking after Katie and keeping herself looking good for Bobby (nearly a full-time job in itself: the waxing, the nails, the peels, the hair). Even as she was tracking it, she told herself it was okay. Nobody was getting hurt. It was only money changing hands. She told herself that whoever’s money it was probably deserved to lose it—they’d probably done something bad in the first place. Brought it upon themselves.

She didn’t let herself consider the lives being ruined by the drugs, the kids who might be taking them, the desperate people who were selling them. She didn’t think about any of that.