Five minutes after my divorce was final, my father gripped my arm outside the courthouse and said, “Block every card, right now.” That night my ex tried to spend $300,000 on his mistress’s sapphire necklace with my company’s black card — in a club my firm owned.

He’d taken it off my mother’s hand, or out of my mother’s box, and given it to his girlfriend and called it his grandmother’s.

“I didn’t know,” Vanessa said. “I swear I didn’t know whose it was. I knew about the company money. I’m not going to lie to you, I knew where it came from, I let myself not think about it. But the ring— when I found out it was your mother’s, I couldn’t. I’ve been wearing a dead woman’s ring for four months and he let me think it was his family’s.”

She was crying.

I looked at the ring.

“Why did you leave him?” I said.

“Because I watched him beg you, through your office window, I was in the car,” she said. “And I realized he’d beg anyone. He’d begged you. He’d beg the next one. I wasn’t special. I was just the one the money went to that year. I’m twenty-nine. I don’t want to be the one the money goes to.”