It made perfect sense. That was the thing about Derek. Everything he said always made perfect sense.
I want you to understand who I was before that week, because it matters to everything that came after.
My name is Nora Bennett. I was thirty-six years old and I lived in a four-bedroom colonial in a quiet Akron suburb, with a husband who ran a lawn and snow removal company, and a six-year-old son named Eli who believed dinosaurs were still alive somewhere in Canada.
I worked from home as a bookkeeper. I drove a minivan with a crumb-filled back seat. I volunteered for the school fundraiser. I was the mother who remembered the class snack schedule.
If you had passed me in the grocery store, you would not have looked twice.
That's how I liked it.
My father was Frank Doyle, a detective with the Summit County Sheriff's Office for thirty-one years. He was a big, quiet, gruff man who made pancakes on Sundays and never once raised his voice at me.
My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was nineteen. After that, it was just the two of us in a small brick house on Linden Street, with a porch swing that squeaked and a kitchen table where he taught me to do my homework by explaining his cases, with the names changed.
"Nora," he used to say, tapping the table with one thick finger, "people lie. Paper doesn't. Follow the paper."
I followed the paper. I studied accounting. I became a Certified Fraud Examiner, and for six years, I worked in the special investigations unit at the Ohio Auditor of State's office in Columbus, tracing stolen money through the books of school districts and county offices and small-town nonprofits.
I was good at it. Quietly, stubbornly good. I once spent four months following seventeen thousand dollars through a church youth fund, and I found it in a lake house in Michigan.
Then I got pregnant with Eli.
I told myself I'd go back after maternity leave. But Derek's landscaping company was just getting off the ground, and someone had to do the books, and a baby doesn't care about your career, and by the time Eli was one, I had stopped saying when I go back and started saying when things settle down.
Derek liked to tell people I was "great with numbers." He never said what I'd actually done with them. I never corrected him.
I've thought a lot about that, too. About how much of my life I let other people describe for me.
I met Derek at a fundraiser for the sheriff's department.
He was thirty, with wide shoulders and sunburned forearms, and he offered to carry my folding chairs. He had a laugh that filled a whole room. He listened when I talked. He remembered my father's name after hearing it once.
He was funny and warm and solid, and the first time he met my dad, he stood up straight and said, "Sir, I intend to take good care of your daughter."
My father grunted and shook his hand. Later, when Derek went to get the car, Dad looked at me and said, "He seems all right."
That was the highest praise my father ever gave anyone.
We married two years later. Eli was born three years after that. And when my father died, two years ago this past January, Derek was the one who held me.
I want to be very clear about that, because it's the part that still confuses me. Dad had a stroke on a Tuesday. He lingered for nine days at Akron General, and for nine days Derek slept on the floor of the hospital room on a folded blanket. He brought me coffee. He learned the names of every nurse. When my father passed at four in the morning, Derek pulled me into his chest and let me sob until his shirt was soaked through.
Nobody can fake that. That's what I told myself, later, when I couldn't understand it.