“It was the one in the navy suit,” Mrs. Prescott said.

Not the blonde. My mother-in-law, Eleanor, sitting in the front row in her good navy suit, nodding along like a woman at a christening. The courtroom made a sound I have never heard before or since. My husband turned and stared at his own mother, and I watched him understand something a full second before I did.

He had not known. That was the part nobody predicted. He had genuinely believed I emptied that account, because Eleanor had told him so, and because he had spent forty-seven years believing whatever his mother handed him. The blonde in the lavender blouse turned out to be Eleanor’s sister-in-law, there because Eleanor had asked her to drive. She had no idea either.

The ring was in Eleanor’s coat pocket. The bailiff found it during the recess she never made it to. She had taken it in March, worn it to the bank in April because she liked how it looked, and told a stranger behind glass that it belonged to her grandmother.