"I came home after six weeks away and found my mother-in-law standing inside my apartment in a satin robe.

I sat in my car in the parking garage for eleven minutes before I opened the banking app.

I knew, before the screen loaded, that it was going to be bad.

I didn't know it was going to be that bad.

The joint savings account Daniel and I had built over nine years — the account we had agreed was untouchable, the one earmarked for a house with a yard, for the future we had talked about on our first anniversary — showed a balance of $214.

Nine years.

Two hundred and fourteen dollars.

My hands were shaking so hard I had to set the phone on the passenger seat and press both palms flat against my thighs.

Then I picked it back up and called him.

He answered on the second ring, which told me he had been waiting.

"Claire—"

"The savings account, Daniel."

Silence.

"How much did you take?"

"It's not — I didn't take it.

I moved it.

There's a difference."

"Sixty-two thousand dollars.

Where did you move it?"

Another silence.

Longer this time.

"Mom had some debts.

It got complicated.

I was going to tell you when you got back."

"You were going to tell me." I said it flat, no rise at the end.

"You moved sixty-two thousand dollars into your mother's debts, put her name on the deed to my apartment, and you were going to tell me when I got back."

"Our apartment, Claire.

It's our apartment."

"It has her name on it, Daniel.

Not mine.

Not yours.

Hers."

"That's temporary—"

"Stop saying that word." My voice came out quieter than I expected, which scared me more than if I had screamed.

"Stop saying temporary like it makes any of this smaller than it is."

"I needed to protect her.

She had nowhere to go."

"She had nowhere to go," I repeated.

"And I had nowhere to come home to.

Did that occur to you?

Did I occur to you at all?"

He didn't answer.

I stared through the windshield at the concrete pillar in front of me.

Someone had scratched the letter R into the gray surface years ago.

I had parked in this spot a hundred times and never noticed it until now.

"I'm coming home," Daniel said finally.

"We can sit down and talk through this properly."

"No."

"Claire—"

"I am not sitting down in that apartment while your mother is in my bedroom.

I am not having a calm conversation about sixty-two thousand dollars over the kitchen table she has apparently claimed as her own." I picked up my grandmother's mug from the cupholder where I had set it.

The glaze was cool against my fingers.

"You have until tomorrow morning to tell me exactly where that money went.

Every transfer.

Every date.

Every account number."

"You're being dramatic."

The word landed like a door slamming.

"I'm being dramatic," I said quietly.

"Okay, Daniel."

I ended the call.

I sat there another few minutes.

Then I opened a different app — not the bank.